The Spring in the Salt Flat

In Utah's west desert, miles from anything green, there is a place called Fish Springs. The land surrounding it is cracked alkali — white, barren, and hostile to life. Nothing should survive there. But deep beneath the salt flat, water pushes upward through ancient rock, surfacing as a series of small springs no wider than a dinner plate.

Those modest seeps do something extraordinary. They create a ten-thousand-acre marsh in the middle of a wasteland. Cattails rise six feet tall. Bulrushes crowd the banks. Over 270 species of birds stop there during migration — pelicans, herons, avocets — drawn to an oasis they can spot from thousands of feet in the air. Fish swim in water that, by all rights, should be brine. The springs do not ask permission from the desert. They simply flow, and everything they touch comes alive.

Ezekiel saw something similar in his vision — water trickling from beneath the threshold of the temple, so small at first that it barely wet his ankles. But that trickle became a river, and wherever the river went, death gave way to life. Salt water turned fresh. Trees bore fruit every month. Their leaves brought healing.

This is how the presence of El Shaddai works. It does not arrive as a flood that overwhelms. It begins as a seep, a trickle, a quiet persistence beneath the surface of our most barren places — and it does not stop until everything it touches is made new.