The Summer the Wells Ran Dry

In the summer of 2012, farmers across southwest Kansas watched their fields turn to powder. Daryl Hestand, a third-generation wheat grower outside of Sublette, walked his cracked acreage every morning, pressing his boot into soil that crumbled like ash. The Ogallala Aquifer — the underground reservoir his family had relied on for sixty years — was dropping faster than anyone had seen. Wells sputtered. Irrigation pivots stood motionless. Daryl told a reporter from the Wichita Eagle that some evenings he would stand at the edge of his property, stare at a cloudless sky, and just say out loud: "We need You to open up. We can't manufacture this."

That is the raw, undecorated cry of Isaiah 64. "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down!" It is the prayer of people who have exhausted every human strategy, who know their hands are too small and too stained to fix what is broken. The prophet does not pretend Israel deserves rescue. "All our righteous acts are like filthy rags," he confesses. "We all shrivel up like a leaf."

Yet even in that barrenness, Isaiah does not walk away from the El Shaddai who holds the rain. He presses closer. "We are the clay; You are the potter." A cracked field cannot water itself. A withered leaf cannot green itself. But the God who shaped us from dust has never once forgotten how to bring life from dry ground.