Water from the Last Place You'd Look

In 2010, a severe drought gripped the Turkana region of northern Kenya. Wells ran dry. Livestock collapsed in the dust. Families walked hours to find muddy puddles barely fit for drinking. International aid workers had all but written the area off as beyond help.

Then a team from UNESCO arrived with ground-penetrating radar and made a staggering discovery: beneath the cracked, barren earth lay the Lotikipi Basin Aquifer — an underground reserve holding roughly 250 billion cubic meters of fresh water. Enough to supply Kenya's entire population for seventy years. It had been there all along, hidden beneath the very ground where people were dying of thirst.

The Israelites at Rephidim knew that desperation. They had followed God into a wilderness with no visible water source, and their throats burned with thirst. They turned on Moses: "Why did you bring us out of Egypt — to kill us?" They looked around and saw only dust and stone. But God told Moses to strike the rock, and water poured from the last place anyone would have thought to look.

This is how the Almighty so often works. Not by removing the wilderness, but by revealing what He has already hidden within it. The provision was there before the crisis arrived. The water existed before the thirst.

When you find yourself in a season of desperate need, remember Rephidim. The God who buried an ocean beneath a desert has already placed what you need closer than you think.