And God Cleansed The Land

This past summer I had the opportunity to hop on a boat and go out on the Chesapeake Bay for a day with the wife and some friends. You think "bay" and immediately get visions of blue crabs in abundance, fishing, sailboats, oysters, seagulls, and beautiful sunsets. We had just gone through a period of heavy rains....not just "some" rain.....but a deluge. The kind of rain where its hard to guess if it would ever stop. The entire Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the USA were affected. All of this water has to go somewhere. Fears of floods in Pennsylvania, the rivers overflowing, and reports that the authorities would need to open the floodgates at Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River because of the amount of water heading toward the northernmost points of the Chesapeake Bay......this stuff was all over the t.v. and newspapers. Some of us were anticipating the demise of Port Deposit, MD since it usually gets flooded when they let loose the gates at the dam because of its location downstream. It never happened. Oh the gates were opened up alright, but Port Deposit dodged a bullet and survived once again.

What wasn't spoken about or reported in the media was what would be the end results of this event. When you have extraordinary amounts of rain, it rinses off the entire area of land. Think of it as God's way of giving us a bath. This sounds all well and good, except that there is always a price to pay. So what was the price? The media didn't tell us. Neighbors never spoke about it. And most people probably never get to see the price. As our boat zipped across the Bay towards the Eastern Shore we were suddenly stunned to see all sorts of stuff floating around and it kept getting worse and worse. We were zig-zagging straight through it all. Unbelieveably huge amounts of refrigerators, washing machines, worn tires, tree stumps, tons of garbage, and other assorted items wafting about amongst the crab-pots and bouys. My friend had to bring the boat to a crawl to get through all of this stuff. I guess the large majority of it all headed right on out to the Atlantic Ocean, but an awful lot of it did wash up on the shoreline as you can see in the picture. What was once beautiful and clean shore was now a total mess.

Every time you toss a wrapper or bottle on the ground you probably never think about what you just did. God sees what you have done and I saw what He did with it.