Two or three months of rain

One · What happened

Rivers up in four states and a count that kept moving

The Associated Press reported on 1 November that the San Juan River was rising through Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The town has just over two thousand people. The Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office warned of catastrophic flooding, and a county spokesperson put the river at about fourteen feet by sundown, with a higher crest forecast for the night. The flood of 1911 crested at about seventeen point eight feet and wiped out most of the town as it then stood. Pagosa Springs had lifted an evacuation order the week before, then put it back on Saturday night.

Officials along Oak Creek in Sedona, Arizona, ordered residents to leave at once. Helicopters took people out of their neighborhoods. The AP counted at least a hundred homes in the evacuation zone, nearly twenty of them holding residents who needed emergency help to get out. One resident told the AP she had “never seen neighborhoods completely submerged in water.” Yavapai County reported no injuries or deaths in Sedona that afternoon. Gila County ordered the whole community of Gisela, several hundred people along Tonto Creek, to evacuate.

By the morning of 2 November, Arizona stations were reporting two people found dead in Flagstaff after the weekend’s flooding. Governor Katie Hobbs declared a statewide emergency that day. The declaration opened two hundred thousand dollars in emergency funding for parts of seven counties and five tribal nations. Coconino County followed on 3 November after three zones along Oak Creek Canyon were evacuated. Euronews, working from aerial pictures of 2 November, described cars and homes swept away in Arboles, Colorado, and about two hundred residents of Durango clearing mud from houses and streets that day. Other outlets gave other death counts that week. The final count had not come in when this was written.

Two · What it is doing

Two verdicts, ready in a minute

A reader in Ohio who watches the Sedona footage on the evening of 1 November has about a minute before he files it. Two verdicts are ready for him. The first says people who build beside a creek chose their water. The second says a region in a drought needed rain and has finally got it, so the loss is a fair price. Each takes a minute to hold and settles his feelings about four states he may never have seen. Euronews did report some relief for reservoirs in a prolonged drought. The second verdict, at least, has a fact under it.

A reader on the San Juan or on Oak Creek sorts the same water from closer in. He checks the river gauge before anything else in the morning. Each dark cloud over the ridge gets read for what it carries, and the gauge gets checked again at night. Pagosa Springs lifted its evacuation order a week before the flood, then had to put it back on Saturday night. A town that has watched that happen learns to distrust a lifted order. Grief for a house arrives with anger at whoever called it safe. Some of the anger goes up to the God who sent the water, and the reader would rather it did not.

Hardin was describing the volume of the water. Rain at that rate falls on the careful household and the careless one alike. The Ohio reader’s first verdict keeps that fact off his own street by assigning the loss to bad judgment. The reservoir verdict works from the other side and holds the loss in view only as a gain for the dry lakes and rivers downstream. A flood that took only the unwise would leave the reader’s own house standing. A rain that came only as a gift would ask nothing of him. Each verdict protects him from the same discovery, that the water on his screen could have fallen on his roof.

Three · Where the ground is

The rain in the same hand

“To satisfy the waste and desolate land” is how God described the work of rain when he answered Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38:27). The question before it asked who sends rain “on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man” (Job 38:26). Job had lost his children by then, and God supplied no reason for that loss. What God supplied was himself, the one who sends water onto ground that has no man on it to say thank you. Dry country in a drought year receives that gift from a hand that also sent water down Oak Creek. Scripture offers no clause that joins the two into a reason.

Jesus ended the Sermon on the Mount with two houses. The story is easy to read as a ruling on the house that fell. The text says of the first house that “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall” (Matthew 7:25). The second house, the one on the sand, got the same weather and “fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:27). Both houses took the storm. Jesus put the difference in the ground, which he defined as hearing his words and doing them. He said it to a crowd that had roofs to think about. A hearer in that crowd had no way to turn the story into a verdict on a neighbor’s lot. A reader today who uses it that way has turned a warning about his own house into a charge against someone else’s. Most readers take the storm in the story to be the day of judgment. The standing house is then a promise about that day and makes no promise about a creek in 2026.

“For the waters have come up to my neck,” David prays in Psalm 69, and he wants God to save him (Psalm 69:1). Then he describes sinking “in deep mire, where there is no foothold” (Psalm 69:2). The psalm offers no theory of why the water came and asks nobody else for one. The Gospel writers put lines of this psalm on Jesus, among them the sour wine offered to him on the cross, which the twenty-first verse names. Christ died for sinners of both kinds, the ones who blame the flooded and the ones who enjoy the rain without a thought for them. God raised him from the dead on the third day. Christ has been under water deeper than Oak Creek.

Paul gave the church in Rome a sentence that divides the two verdicts between two people and then asks one congregation to hold both. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). Somewhere in these four states a family is glad of the rain this week, and somewhere else in them a family is hauling a ruined carpet to the curb. The sentence tells a congregation to do the first with the one and the second with the other, in a single breath. Paul wrote it to a church whose members included Jews and Gentiles in the same rooms, who disagreed about food and days. A local church in a flooded county carries it out with shovels. A church far away carries out its half through the phone numbers of the ones there.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

The reader in Ohio and the reader in Pagosa Springs face different weeks. Each of these five fits the one he has. Four need only a phone, while the fifth needs a table and a household willing to sit at it.

1. 01

   Ask someone in the flooded counties what the water did at his address.

   Choose a former neighbor or a name from your church directory who lives near the Four Corners. Call or write today with that one question. Let him finish, and offer no reason and no lesson. Job’s three friends sat with him for seven days and nights without a word (Job 2:13). They were still wrong once they started talking. If he says his own house is fine, ask about the neighbors.

2. 02

   Send money to a church that is standing in the water.

   Find the website of a congregation in Pagosa Springs or Sedona and call its office. Ask what it is paying for this week, such as hotel rooms or a dump trailer. Send that amount to that church the same day. Then ask if it will need a work team in the spring, after the mud has dried and the news has moved on. The burdens in Galatians 6:2 include, this week, a soaked mattress that needs hauling.

3. 03

   Find the verdict you posted and take it down.

   Scroll through your last three days of posts and messages for any line that gave the flood a reason, such as people who build in washes or a desert that finally got what it deserved. Delete it, or send a short correction to whoever received it. A sentence you would not say to a woman standing in her flooded kitchen should not stand on your page either.

4. 04

   Walk your own address and watch where the water goes.

   Take a hose to the roof edge, or wait for the next rain and stand outside while it runs. Watch where the runoff heads, toward your foundation or toward a neighbor’s lot. Fix the one thing you can this week, such as a cleared drain. Then find your homeowner’s or renter’s policy and read the section on water, since most standard policies leave flood out. The house in Matthew 7 is the one you live in. The work on your own gutter takes an hour.

5. 05

   Read Matthew 7:24–29 at the table and ask whose roof the story is about.

   Ask the youngest person there which house Jesus is talking about, and let him reach the answer that it is the house of whoever is listening. Then tell the household one of Jesus’ words you have heard and have not done. Say the day you will start, and write it on the calendar. The crowds in Matthew 7:28 were astonished at his teaching and then walked home to roofs of their own. Name the task before the plates are cleared.