The Well That Never Ran Dry

In 2012, a brutal drought scorched 80 percent of America's farmland. Across southern Kansas, cattle ponds turned to cracked mud. Irrigation systems sputtered and failed. But on the Unruh family farm outside Meade, a hand-dug limestone well — bored by the family's great-grandfather in 1904 — kept producing. Cool, clean water rose from an aquifer so deep that no surface drought could touch it. Neighbors drove miles with empty tanks and left with enough to keep their herds alive. Margaret Unruh said something her grandmother used to say every time she lowered the bucket: "You don't thank the rope. You thank what's at the bottom."

Isaiah declares, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Notice the prophet doesn't say you will merely survive. He says you will draw with joy. There is an aquifer beneath every drought season of the soul — not a trickle of bare sufficiency, but a source so abundant it transforms fear into singing. "Surely God is my salvation," Isaiah writes. "I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord Himself, is my strength and my defense."

The wells of the Almighty do not depend on the weather above ground. When everything visible has dried up — when finances crack, when health fails, when grief bakes the soil of your heart — the invitation remains: lower your bucket. What you'll find at the bottom isn't just relief. It's a joy worth shouting about to everyone within earshot.