Life Giving Water

There are several verses of scripture that refer to living water. After contemplating how important water is in the history of the world, and in my personal life, it is easy to see why Christ and His gospel was compared to life giving water, but His is an everlasting well of water leading to eternal life.

It wasn't until years after leaving the farm that I gave much thought to how important water is to man's survival (except for the occasional times that we had no electricity to run our water pump or the pump would quit working. Then we went into survival mode.) Throughout the history of the world, civilizations began near water and as new settlements were established they were always near a source of water.

Part of the Musselshell River on our farm.

Our 1200 or so acres of land were dependent on the grid of irrigation ditches that traversed them. I recently found a website that discusses the uses of the Musselshell River which ran through our property and provided the irrigation water for us. The water supply for our irrigation system originated in Deadman's Basin about 85 miles upstream from our property. At regular intervals along the river were manmade diversion dams that fed the irrigation systems for the various farmers along the way. In my experience the diversion dam was the only area of our ditches that had concrete. Once the water was diverted to our ditches it flowed down dirt ditches. There were no fancy portals or siphon tubes to send the water into our fields. We had to dam the water with large sheets of treated canvas held in place with 2 X 4s. We would walk along the ditch bank in rubber boots and a shovel in hand to make cuts in the ditch bank for the water to spill over and flow into the field until it reached the other end and spread out across the entire width and breadth of the field. Then we would pull out the dam, move it down further, pack mud back into the cuts and make new cuts for the next section of field. This required frequent trips in the middle of the night and throughout the day until our water turn was over, and if we were diligent all the fields received their life giving water to survive until the next watering turn.


This is the irrigation ditch that ran past our house, probably less than 10 feet from my bedroom window. In these pictures taken at a Lear family reunion, we are playing tug o' war over the ditch. I would say this brother (I think it is Jim) was on the losing team.