I let Annie, my Springer Spaniel, out early this morning and I stood and watched the rain falling out of the sky.
My first thoughts were ‘What a miserable day’, then I got to thinking, as you do, about the miracle of water.
Every drop of water on this remarkable planet is millions of years old and much of it would have been consumed by the dinosaurs!
Now I know that many people bless their food before they eat but how many actually bless the water they are about to drink, shower with, spray on the garden, wash up the dishes and so on.
Water should not be a liquid as a recent article in The Guardian explains:
‘Take a glass of water and look at it now. Perhaps the strangest thing about this colourless, odourless liquid is that it is a liquid at all. If water followed the rules, you would see nothing in that glass and our planet would have no oceans at all. All of the water on Earth should exist as only vapour: part of a thick, muggy atmosphere sitting above an inhospitable, bone-dry surface. A water molecule is made from two very light atoms – hydrogen and oxygen – and, at the ambient conditions on the surface of the Earth, it should be a gas.’
I remember a description of how wonderful water is from a book called (I think) Undiscovered Scotland by W H Murray when he describes one of his climbs. It started off quite cold and as he ascended the rock face it got warmer and warmer, he hadn’t packed enough water and was very dehydrated once he reached the top. There in front of him was a small Lochan and he dived in and he wrote something like this ‘Until that time I had forgotten how wet water actually was!’
So, we all need to start looking at this amazing liquid reverently as it sustains life on Earth, we wouldn’t exist if water didn’t exist.
Water truly is miraculous.
