One of the main characters in Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, is the river itself, which moves through the story like Jayber does, picking things up as it goes, sometimes setting them down again. The river is always changing—sometimes fat and angry, “as if the mountains had melted and were flowing to the sea.” In flood season, it could swirl over its banks and drown the farms and their chickens. It could tear limbs from trees. It could ruin the earth the way water had in Noah’s day.
It’s a flood that drives Jayber back to the town he was born in — Port William — where the river is more settled, and where Jayber settles himself too. His life goes on, and there are good friends and terrible loss, but the river remains in its place— rather, it doesn’t. It moves on, bypassing the town and searching the plains and valleys beyond.
In the end, Jayber moves from town to live in a glade by the riverbank, where he gardens and fishes and lies awake at night listening to the river, which has become a friend. Here, it waters his garden and laps against his porch. It makes the trees over his cabin grow strong and tall. Here, it is like a wild horse that has been tamed. Here, it brings life and not death.
In my own life, I’ve seen the river do both.
I remember the winter the bottoms flooded, and with them, the Super 8 Motel and Dickey Bub Farm & Home. I can’t imagine the smell of sopping bedclothes, or the sight of shoeboxes floating out the automatic doors. I understand why God unleashed his wrath on sin with floodwaters, because they both destroy the earth and wash it clean.
Because I also remember standing on the shoulder of a Colorado mountain, looking into a vast valley to see a river washing through it and turning it green. I’ve seen the way water caresses and nourishes the roots of sycamores. And I’ve read how, in Ezekiel’s vision of the future, he saw a river streaming forth from the temple of God, pouring into the Arabah valley and bringing it to life. Ezekiel says that trees will spring up and fisherman will gather on its banks. Flowers and fruit will grow. “So,” it says, “everything will live where the river goes.”
“So everything will live where the river goes.”
~ Ezekiel 47:9
“Son of man, have you seen this?” the angel asked Ezekiel, and I have. The people of God are his temple, and I’ve seen his living water flow out our church doors and rush into the streets of our city.
Just last Wednesday, I sat praying in the sanctuary with three friends, from age eighteen to gray hair. One talked about how she wanted to show hospitality to the new neighborhood she and her husband had moved into, and how they had prayed over the men who’d driven their moving truck. Another told us how she’d prayed for the nurse in the Urgent Care waiting room who was stressed and crying, and how God had placed her there for just that purpose.
And so the river tumbles forth and deepens, channeling living water into hospital rooms and apartment buildings, washing into homes and watering gardens and filling the empty cups at our kitchen tables. Jesus never touched anyone who wasn’t changed, and his people carry that same living water through the barren countryside, so that where the river goes, everything lives.
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