Sunday Soak: A Bunch of Dam Myths
The lies we believe about common structures in our environment and lives.
*Due to a rapidly worsening sinus infection, there is no audio this week!
Hello, my beautiful friends! Welcome back for the second installment of our four-part series on the ways we humans dam up our hearts to prevent the living water of Jesus Christ from flowing freely in our lives.
I am so glad that you’re here. I want to be so honest here that my whole life I have loved writing, and it’s been on my heart for so long to be a writer encouraging others through the Word of Jesus. If you had told me 16 years ago when I started following Christ that I would be doing it by sharing nature stories, I would have told you, “Um, no, I am going to teach in the inner city.” How radically different the plan has unfolded, and I am so thankful that God lovingly discarded my best ideas and replaced them with this good, hard story He’s given me.
So THANK YOU for continuing to journey with me. As always, if this series or part speaks to you, please share it with a friend or two.
Last week, I told you about the huge project in my hometown to restore the Boardman River to its original path and glory, allowing the waters to flow freely as a channel, where a series of five dams had once held it hostage.
The dams - Boardman, Brown Bridge, and Sabin, were built for hydroelectric power, and the blockages developed a reservoir above each called Keystone Pond, Brown Bridge Pond, and Sabin Pond. I suppose an argument could be made that it was called a pond because it wasn’t used for water storage, like a reservoir might imply. But then it should technically be called an impoundment, and that also doesn’t explain Lake Powell, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Mead, Lake Oahe, Fort Peck Lake, which are all reservoirs, are titled lakes. Interestingly enough, only 24 of the largest 129 reservoirs in the United States are actually named “Reservoir”. The rest are “Lakes”.
When you experience a wild body of water, there is no comparison to a massive puddle of stagnant water. The Boardman impoundments were less desirable than reservoirs in arid climates, because natural lakes and streams abounded in every direction around them. The Sabin Pond, in particular, was rarely used, save for a rogue angler. One hundred years of sand, silt, and organic sediment built up over time to make it a near-dead body of water, covering 40 acres of rolling hills and river bed where the Boardman, or “Ottaway” as the Ojibwe called it, ran free. But in living memory, none of us had an image of the freedom of those waters, only the juxtaposition of the impoundment versus the waters around it. The creeks, the streams, the rivers, the ponds, the lakes, the bigger lakes, the greater lakes, the Great Lakes. No one goes for a fake lake when you’re surrounded by the real deal.
I don’t think we can understand how dammed up we are if we don’t know what freedom looks like, or at least hear of it. If people knew about the canyon that drowns under Lake Powell, would they see it as a premier destination for boating? If we knew the fullness of life we were made for when God created us in His Image, would we ever settle for the “best life” we have created in our imaginations?
So today, we are talking about myths surrounding our dams and strongholds, as well as the freedom for which we are truly meant. Satan is the Deceiver and the father of lies, so any deceptions coming from our strongholds are straight from him, so we are also going to get a little help from our good friend, C.S. Lewis in his phenomenal work, “The Screwtape Letters”, which illustrate the types of deceptions that keep us locked into our strongholds. Satan is the proposed speaker in each of the included italicized quotes.
Controlled Irrigation vs. Strongholds of Watering Our Own Paths
“The humans live in time but [God] destines them to eternity…He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or the Present – either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure….But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future – haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth – ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other – dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.”
There are a number of myths around controlled irrigation and dams. It’s understandable that this is one of our greatest environmental strongholds, because we worry what will happen to our food supply if a water source is removed. As it stands, though, dam-era irrigation techniques are not necessarily the most efficient need to grow crops or use water. Farmers across the entire world are developing new techniques that use less water and produce MORE crops.
We, too, spend our energy and resources in the futility of the way we did before we met Jesus, not knowing that handing our burdens to Him will make them light, and the multiplication of our work and desires will be unfathomable.
Jacob deceived his brother, Esau, to gain a greater position, even though it had already been prophesied that Esau would serve Jacob. Rather than allowing the Lord to bring this to fruition, he and his mother conspired to deceive his father so that he could steal Esau’s blessing from Isaac, after he had already taken advantage of him to get his birthright. And what did this produce? Yes, Jacob was still the chosen father of Israel, but he lived a significant portion of his life running from his brother in fear of his wrath.
Jesus came so that we could all know the blessing and birthright we have in Him. Our every day is secure, according to His promises. He cares about our worries, our desires, and our prayers. He has chosen us, knowing we had nothing to offer in return for His sacrifice. He is not interested in a trade deal with us, except His life for ours. He has promised to provide everything that we need.
Too often we settle for our own good ideas. We get a myth stuck in our head that God is withholding from us, that He has held back the deepest desires of our hearts - the marriage we long for, the satisfaction we desire, the ministry we wish we could build. It can even feel like He doesn’t want us to take part in the goodness of the Kingdom. But this is not the view of the Father who would never give His children a scorpion if they asked for an egg. We have to remember that a loving Father would also never give His children the egg if it were rotten.
His plans for us are always greater than we could imagine, and often far less work than what we have devised. Freedom in Christ means that the Lord is our Provider and Protector, the One who has set our future in motion and who has not let us go astray from His far-better plans for us.
Water Storage vs. Strongholds of Relying on Ourselves to Provide
“We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy [God]. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”
“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”
So this myth still connects to the last, since a lot of water storage is connected to irrigation. But it gets so much worse here. Reservoirs have larger surface areas than flowing bodies of water, they heat up and evaporate faster. And actually, they create a little microcosm of localized warming in their vicinity that even more intensely heats up the water to keep evaporating at a higher rate. This is because the nutrient-rich, trapped sediment is a haven for blue-green algae, along with other bacteria and diseases, which have a heating effect from within the water source. As the river dries up, so too do the sources of water storage.
In Luke 12:12-21, Jesus gives us a jarring parable commonly known as “The Rich Fool”, told to two brothers who had come to Him to settle a dispute over an inheritance. “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions,” He warned.
The rich fool was a man who had an abundant build-up of wealth already when he yielded an exceptionally abundant crop. He tore down his barns and built bigger ones to store up the entire harvest for himself so that he can take it easy the rest of his life. Then he died, and all the things he stored up were worthless to him. The Lord rebuked him for storing up worthless things.
The Bible makes it clear that we are to store up our treasure in Heaven, and I believe from looking into this deeply that it can mean nothing other than making disciples and serving the Kingdom of God with our whole lives by daily denying ourselves and rising to take up the cross He has given us to bear. Heavenly treasure is that which endures, and so nothing on earth that we might hoard like money, status, or possessions count. Those get left behind. But the disciples we make go with us. The joy and peace we have? Ours forever. The hope of Heaven, resting in the Lord, opulent worship, lavish love, extravagant grace - all ours for eternity.
Greed, on the other hand, leads to more greed. As I’ve made more money over time and collected more material possessions, I’ve actually had to get rid of things that I feel too attached to and intentionally give money, even if I don’t want to part with it, so that I don’t have that stronghold in place. If I didn’t do that regularly, I’d be facing down the reality of greed.
If this is your stronghold, Satan will always have you looking around one more corner, one more light at the end of the tunnel, one more purchase, one more home project, one more investment, one more step before you can let off the hoarding gas and be “satisfied”. But instead, that satisfaction never comes. It is a state of constant discontent and worry. Enough is never enough. He will lead you to justify everything you own and store as wisdom for a rainy day, or as an understandable means to an end, or as justifiable to protect your family under the false mask of selflessness. He will lead you to withhold your resources from others under the guise that your need is greater and more pressing.
Too, we are convinced of this in a spiritual context, that we have all of the knowledge needed to impress God. That we do not need to pour out to others, to bring our gifts as an offering for the community of God, but to store up for ourselves, our interests, our desires our needs. “To love others as I love myself, I must first learn to love myself,” says our culture. We become unteachable, resistant to sanctification, and jealous of our positions of honor in the church, gatekeeping to block others from diluting the pool of “special” people. Greed is a condition of the heart that harms us, our communities, and our relationship with God, no matter how hard we try to spin it in our favor to say it’s what’s needed and warranted in the moment.
Because here’s the truth: Greed is not wisdom. Greed is not love. Greed is not from God or blessed by God. Greed is not overlooked. Greed is not justifiable. Greed brings curses. Greed will never be satisfied. Greed leads to destruction. Greed separates us from God, because our love of money means we hate Him. Greed does not go by any other name. It is greed, no matter how much lipstick you put on that pig.
Freedom in Christ means that, rather than having to store up for ourselves and gain now, we can freely pour out our lives, our time, and our resources according to the radical generosity of His love, because our eternity is already secure.
Recreation vs. Strongholds of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
“Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.”
“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Ahh, the myth of recreation. There are many aspects of this I could talk about, but I’m going to focus on fishing. Dams that create recreational fishing rely on artificial systems for fish reproduction. For example, they may heavily stock a stream or reservoir where wild fish once thrived. They may shuttle fish on tankers up river to simulate spawning activity, but this poses a number of issues. First, these are most often hatchery fish, meaning that they only preserve recreation, not really wild, native fish populations. This is further evidenced by the fact that dams create bad environments for fish to live, as the same conditions that make reservoirs gross are just as bad for fish as they are for us. Cold water fish can’t live in warm streams. Thus, restocking becomes a common practice when all the fish die off.
Furthermore, there is a massive cost associated with the maintenance of this fake life. Our 88,600+ non-federal dams need $157.5 billion in upgrades, and the remaining federal dams need $4 billion just to be viable for future use. The Army Corps of Engineers claims that dam-based recreation produces 21 billion tourism dollars annually, but they claim fishing licenses as part of that revenue, which skews that number.
Fish were made for freedom to move about a certain pattern of water in a certain way. We, too, were made for freedom, but find ourselves so entangled in the pleasures, prosperity, and priorities of this world.
The story of the Prodigal Son reminds us of the lies this world provides in its riches and recreation. The young man wished his father dead, took his inheritance, and squandered it on wild living, having nothing left to weather the famine that followed. He found himself working in a pig sty, longing to eat the food they were feeding to the pigs, but surrounded by people who would rather feed/sustain the pigs than sustain his life. Desperately, he returns home with the intent to serve his father, the only source of life. His father accepts him back as a son, not a servant, and throws a lavish party for him.
This is because he was living in the myth that the world has something better to offer than God, that the lifestyle he wanted was in any way sustainable for happiness and fulfillment, and that the approval he sought was found outside of his Father’s kingdom. But the fact is that there is nothing wilder than following Christ. No life more adventurous, no greater source of continuous, sustainable, daily-renewable joy and fulfillment than a life devoted to Christ, because He is the Author and Perfecter of our faith and our Maker, and He made us for a purpose: to follow Him.
Listen, we all have worldly strongholds that keep us stuck here. Whether that is the pursuit of money, attention, love, material objects, beauty, youth, health, comfort, or even our families’ best lives, there is some bastardized version of Heaven that we have clutched so tightly that we cannot imagine letting go of it and still having our lives mean something.
To some extent, this may be a skewed view of what it means to follow Jesus. I’ve heard friends tell me, “I faithfully served Jesus for years, and He didn’t give me what I desired in return, so I went my own way,” as if Jesus could even need or want our measly gifts, like a holy vending machine where we put in our effort in exchange for what we perceive is the good life. So let’s get this one straight: We have nothing to offer Jesus. He has given us a life on mission with Him so that we would know the fullness of joy He has in the most fulfilling life there can be - gathering souls to Heaven. This is a gift to us, not a payment from us.
Our lives are not better with sin and idols ruling over us. Freedom in Christ means that we are no longer slaves to sin and the wayward desires of this world. No longer does sin rule us. We are forgiven and free.
Flood Control vs. Strongholds of Avoiding Suffering
“Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [God’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else…He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.”
Floods are a serious matter, and there are communities around the U.S. and world that rely on the help of dams to mitigate floods. However, it’s really not as many as believed. Oftentimes, a dam is only holding back the flood that it created in the first place. Think about it. On the Boardman River, the Brown Bridge Quiet Area was a large impoundment of water created and held back by a dam where a river once flowed freely and without causing floods. When they attempted to remove the dam, the temporary structure broke and the reservoir water flooded the homes below. It’s not that the dam was essential to prevent natural flooding. It was essential to prevent flooding by the body of water it created. And so in a sense, most dams are flood-preventative. I hope you see that this is really, really stupid.
Let me be clear: the Johnstown Flood that killed over 2000 people was NOT a natural disaster.
So yes, by all means, guard your hearts against sin and darkness. Put up wise boundaries and don’t throw your pearls before swine. Be on guard against the enemy’s schemes and the false prophets of the world. But let’s drop the view that our hyper-Western, comfort-driven lens of Christianity is safer, better, and in any way Biblical.
We will never out-run suffering in this life. There will be heartache, failure, and death. There will be setbacks, tragedies, and regrets. Trials and discipline - these will come in abundance. But that does not mean it is all bad. In fact, we see some of our most beautiful seasons of growth, of refinement, and of intimacy with the Lord and the Church in our deepest seasons of suffering.
Back in 2018, my first husband left me. It was a very ugly, very painful situation, but it was through this trial that I began to rely on other people, accept help, and trust love. God also drew me closer to Him and His Heart than I had ever been before, taking my faith to completely new depths, and I learned that in my sorrow, I could have complete and utter joy and peace.
And yet, as I began to date again a couple of years later, my prayers looked a lot like, “OK, and just lead me to all the correct things so that I can avoid suffering.” Has anyone else ever prayed a prayer like that? The one that is laden with the false belief that if we do everything according to God’s will, that we will avoid suffering altogether? The one that says any suffering we go through MUST BE the result of mistakes we made in following Him correctly? I don’t want to get into a big discussion about the theology of God’s will today, but He did give us some truths that tells us this is pretty bad thinking.
We live in a sin-fallen world that will not be redeemed; it is getting worse, not better, and we will be the target of others’ sins, the victims of disease that have no specific cause, and face ailments completely outside of our control and that have nothing to do with the spiritual conditions of our lives. Attempting to avoid suffering, rather than seeking Christ in it and surrendering to God, keeps us distanced from the sanctifying work of Christ in our lives, stuck in shallow relationships, and living an inauthentic life. Although it is natural to want to protect ourselves, it is ultimately childish to think we can avoid suffering hardships in the course of life and somehow come out ahead.
We are all called to endure with the body of believers through the local church - through thick and thin, friends. We are called to share in the sufferings of Christ, bear each other’s burdens, lay down our lives, and take up our crosses daily.
But for as many times as suffering and sacrifice are guaranteed in the Bible, there are probably 10x the reassurances that God will be with us in all of it. As we face fears, accusations, persecution, physical and spiritual threats, deep sorrows, heartaches, and trials, the Lord is still in control and is with us. Suffering does not mean that God has neglected us nor forgotten us, not that He has abandoned us or betrayed us. The only one God has ever forsaken was Christ on the Cross, allowing Him to die so that He could defeat death on our behalf - so that death would be the ONE type of suffering we would never have to endure for ourselves.
Freedom in Christ means that we can face anything, knowing that God always walks through the deep waters with us and that our future is utterly secure in Heaven, no matter what troubles come in this life.
Hydroelectric Power vs. Strongholds of Pride
“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered…[y]ou must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.”
Hydroelectric power is a diminishing return. For one thing, it is not more cost-effective if the cost to upkeep of the dam and mitigate its impact on the environment is greater than the production of power, such as on the Snake River, where more than $17 billion (yup, a lot of that is tax dollars) has been spent on fish recovery. Similarly, the dams in my hometown were renovated in 1979 for $9.5 million (more than $40 million in today’s money), while the project to remove the dams and restore the river cost around $8 million, and the cost to install this new FishPass is slated to be $20 million for a dam that isn’t really necessary. And since dams are unreliable sources of water during, let’s say, a drought, it costs regions big money to make up for the energy losses.
Those in favor of attempting to sustain hydropower largely rely on logical fallacies and myths to make their arguments. If that sounds familiar, it is because we, too, believe that we have a sustainable amount of power in this life that we can wield for our own devices.
I agree with Francis Chan that I don’t think the Lord hates anything more than He does pride, not only because it profanes His Name as the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Alpha and Omega, the only Existent One, and God Most High, it is also utter destruction to us. If we look at Adam and Eve eating that fruit in the Garden, we see that our pride is our most formidable enemy that the Enemy can exploit so readily. When given the most minute twist of words, Eve was tempted enough to rely on herself - not to stand on what God had said, not to run to God to ask Him to repeat Himself - to figure out the conundrum. Her logic told her that the fruit looked good, and that God must be holding out. Adam went along.
Later, Eve bore a son the exiled couple named “Abel”, which means “vapor”, understanding deeply that we are here for but a moment, and foreshadowing the Ecclesiastical declaration that our lives are but vapor, knowing firsthand that their pride had gone before their own destruction. And indeed, in sin their son was slain by his brother, causing untold anguish by Chapter 4 of the Word they thought they knew better than God.
We were made in the Image of God, the highest possibility of anything in all Creation, and yet we are still so driven by pride, even before the whole world had fallen. The modern day has been wrapped up in self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, best-self culture for so long that we hardly see it anymore in regard to an inferiority complex, but the superiority complex is far less recognized as a sickness, and even glorified to a certain extent as we worship celebrities and try to emulate them.
We wish we could be significant, important, and adored, so we grab for whatever elevates our sense of pride, be it power, fame, position, possessions, physical appearance, occupation, status of all kinds, accomplishments, or anything else to create either a true or fabricated narrative about our superiority to others. This happens in the Church as often as it happens in the world, so don’t miss this.
But in the Kingdom of God, there is no comparison to each other. There is only comparison to God, and we all have fallen short of His glory. There is no possibility that we can reach His glory without Christ, and there is no possibility of saving ourselves from death outside of Christ. We are simply all pathetic, weak sheep in need of a Savior. Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we have been saved by grace through faith, which is not from us, but is a gift from God. We didn’t do any work for it, SO THAT we can’t boast in it. God left no room for our pride in His plan of redemption.
Yet, so often, even Christians can fall prey to powerful strongholds like unforgiveness, jealousy, and self-promotion. Can you imagine if you had to stand before God and give an account for your unforgiveness toward someone who deeply wounded you, what would you say? “Sorry God, Your forgiveness is great, but what that person did to me was far greater than your grace.” Absolutely no way would you say that, so why do you say that with your actions now and let your heart turn to bitterness?
God is so much greater than our pride says, and we are so much greater to Him than the status our pride seeks! We are already significant to God. We are already chosen and holy and loved by Him. He has already given us all the status we need in Christ, who causes us to stand righteous in the Presence of the Holy of Holies and not die. We already have His great plans for us. We have all the status that we need - forgiven and free!
Freedom in Christ means that we are no longer slaves to works, attempting to earn our salvation. We are no longer slaves to status-seeking, attempting to elevate ourselves to a position of significance for which we often long. Our lives have been bought and paid for on the Cross by the most important Man who ever lived - Jesus Christ.
Relics vs. Strongholds of Stuckness
“The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
That old adage “the devil you know” may be too true for it to be comfortable in some cases. It’s definitely true for dams, that there is a great fear of removing them because of the unknowns of what comes after. When the dams were removed from my hometown, money was one of the biggest concerns - that it would reduce property values and cost a lot. I’ve already addressed the cost myth, but too in this case, dam removals by and large increase property values around the river. Recreation activities like fishing, boating, and hiking then bring in greater revenue to the surrounding area. And in a broader context, there has been shown to be no environmental impact of removing a dam, because any immediate issues caused by sediment, flooding, or distribution of organisms is rapidly rectified by nature itself, while the cost of dam upkeep continues to be an increasing price tag and environmental decline.
I think just about any human has a set of beliefs that are not from Jesus, but that seem to be integral to our life structures and impossible to remove, even if harmful left in tact. Sometimes we can see the harm in our belief systems and know that they are not actually true - like my depressive episodes when I believe I am worthless and stupid - but be unaware of how to remove them. And sometimes the beliefs we hold just seem so true that we don’t want to break them down.
I can’t go into all of the myths around these strongholds, because I believe they are unique to each of us, and many may be the things listed above. Each of us has been born into a set of circumstances, to a people, to a place and a time, to a body. Our experiences and genetic codes write a lot of these beliefs for us, and we realize that they are there as we experience the decay and costliness that they bring to our lives.
At the heart of these myths in general this: these things conflict with what Jesus says is right and true, and He is faithful to deliver us from the old and broken down into the new and good. We do not have to fear that removing these dams will ultimately result in us being worse off, because everything the Lord touches becomes more beautiful.
Freedom in Christ means that we were made for so much more than what we know in the world into which we were born. We were made for real and lasting life in the Kingdom of God.
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Friends, we were made for freedom and for the love of Christ to flow through us richly and wildly. Next week, we are going to get into how we can remove strongholds in our lives, and this week I would just ask that you would pray for God to open your eyes to the myths you believe about your own dams and to build up a desire in you to break free of them.
Until next time, may all that is created testify to God’s power and divine nature, that you may be encouraged by His love all around you.