Sunday Soak: These Dam Strongholds

The elaborate fabrications of our fear and pride.

Happy Sunday, friends! It is great to be back from the holidays and be able to introduce the first of a four-part series on the way we humans dam up our hearts to prevent the living water of Jesus Christ from flowing freely in our lives. 

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Back in my early 20s, I read a book I found by happenstance in the library where my mother worked. It was probably the first memoir I had read since Anne Frank in the 7th grade, and I boredly picked it off the shelf one day and began reading it without knowing that it would veritably change my life.

It was David E. Morine’s “Two Coots in a Canoe”, a memoir of the time his old friend H. Ramsay Peard (d. 2003) asked him to canoe 400 miles of the Connecticut River.  Along the way, Morine and Peard stayed with 29 near-strangers instead of camping, chatted up people along the way, and had a sensational adventure. Morine, a conservationist, introduced me to the field of conservation and art of memoirs, both integral to navigating the wilderness in my own heart, and first caused me to think about the way we use water in particular. 

Water has become one of my passions, as the majority of my efforts to go outside lead me to water. Whether I am standing at the top of a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan amidst a challenging sand dune hike, following my husband through a narrow backwoods stream in search of brook trout, cruising on the family boat with my siblings, running around a local pond, soaking in a hot spring, floating down a trout stream, or diving into some body of water, it is absolutely life-giving for me. Honestly, what is skiing, but the art of gliding down a collective mass of frozen water?

A friend once asked me what self-care looked like to me. I think she meant to ask if I preferred pedicures or facials, but I told her I just wanted to stare at rocks in a river and maybe dip my hand in to touch some of them. She was horrified, believing I had no idea how to care for myself. But I always feel sorry for those who believe that our souls can be soothed by scrubs, oils, fuzzy blankets, sparkling drinks, or even a bit of quiet found within the confines of a concrete structure. 

Even if someone has a healthy view of self care, I’ve never missed the three hours of sleep I lost by getting up long before dawn to meet a friend on the river at first light, nor the “zen” from a yoga retreat in exchange for a mud-caked weekend adventure in the woods, nor the green smoothie I exchanged for campfire tacos. Difference of opinions, I suppose, but I just want a stream and some river rocks, and to fill my eyes and ears with the cheapest self care I know: the soothing movement of uninhibited, flowing water. 

As some of you know, I’ve been battling episodic depression for the better part of the last 15 months. This fall, my husband and I agreed that I should get some professional intervention after many of my own efforts proved insufficient. No, not for lack of faith, not for lack of salvation, not for lack of looking to Jesus for my hope. It’s just plain old being a frail human in a fallen world. So this poor therapist has the pleasure of peering into this nature-metaphor-producing mind once a week, just like the rest of you. 

I asked her in December, “Do you know anything about dead rivers?” She raised an eyebrow and gave me a slow “no…” that meant, “Where could this possibly be going?” I proceeded to describe to her the conditions that dams create that kill our waterways, decimate our wild fish populations, prevent healthy flow, prevent the growth of good life and foster the growth of the bad, and that alter our micro ecosystems and landscapes in ways we never imagined when we went on our national dam-building spree in the 20th Century.

I told her that I felt this way about my heart. That there was a dam blocking and clogging my soul river, a stronghold or series of strongholds I could not see, but which kept me from living in the full vitality that Jesus intended when He gave me His very life in exchange for my own. 

Let me insert a disclaimer here that while I am personally for dismantling most dams, I’m not here to convince you that they’re bad, good, or neutral. This is a publication about faith, not the environment. But the dams represent something incredibly profound in our hearts and in our faith journeys that I hope to convey here. So when I went home over the holiday break, one of my greatest desires was to walk the site of a river whose dams had recently been removed and vitality restored by letting the river flow in brazen freedom. 

Between 1867-1921, a series of dams were placed along the Boardman River in Northern Michigan. It began with the Union Street Dam in downtown Traverse City and was completed with the construction of the Brown Bridge Dam upstream. These dams produced a depreciating level of hydroelectric power to the region until the majority of the dams either washed out or became so built up with sediment that, providing minimal benefit to the electrical grid, they were no longer cost effective or feasible to maintain, and all but the Union Street Dam were decommissioned by 2006.

Such is the story of many dams across the United States, which has 91,804 in total. They have served a number of purposes as we developed the nation, especially after WWII, such as mass irrigation, water storage, flood control, recreation, hydroelectric power, and a few others. 

The dams in our hearts work similarly. I personally believe our motivations, and thus our dams, come down to fear and pride. We’re driven by one or the other, and that causes us to place these barriers in our spiritual lives in order to control outcomes, and while some do achieve the end we desire, all prevent our hearts from overflowing with streams of living water when we place our trust in Jesus (John 7:38).

So let’s look at some common uses for dams and the complementary strongholds in our own hearts. 

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1. Controlled Irrigation 

The Dust Bowl that contributed to the Great Depression gave cause for fears of the future of agriculture, particularly across the Great Plains, and dams were built to supply mass irrigation to farmers. Today, around 10% of our crops are irrigated by water stored behind dams, and places like Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, California, and Arkansas rely heavily on irrigation, either from natural or dammed sources, to grow crops that feed a multitude of people. (When you know where your food comes from, you can see the complex systems made up of both good and less-than-savory entities that keep us going every day.) 

These are the strongholds in our hearts that keep us from depending on the Lord for provision. Rather than waiting on Him to provide the rain from the crops in our lives that we want to grow, we make it happen ourselves, and these often center around deep desires that we have. Just like the desire to grow food for the multitude is not wrong, many of our desires are not wrong and may have even been placed on our hearts by the Lord, but trouble comes when we start to engineer their flourishing in our lives.

In the Bible, Abraham and Sarah were promised offspring that would produce descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore (Genesis 22:17). But in their unbelief, they devised to obtain offspring through Sarah’s maid, Hagar. Abraham impregnated her, the relationship between Sarah and Hagar became abusive, and the child she birthed was not the one God had chosen to fulfill His promises. Their desires and unbelief were pure enough. They wanted what God had promised, but Sarah was well past child-bearing years and God was taking His sweet time. These are the most vulnerable places that can tempt us to put up a dam. 

This might mean that we use dating apps and move our boundaries for what a viable spouse might look like. We see women, especially, begin to date men who are not believers, because they don’t think they’ll find a believing man. Someone might rush the timing of something God has laid on their hearts, such as in building a ministry or making a business move. It might mean pursuing something God has clearly said no to, because it seems good to us. 

It’s not that the desires on our hearts are bad, but that we are called to relinquish everything to the Lord and allow Him to be the one who orders our steps. When we choose to carve out our own steps, we choose to live in the tension with God that we do not trust Him to provide for the deepest areas of our hearts, relegating Him to a mere divine assistant in our lives, meant to enhance the smaller things for which we care far less, and trusting ourselves to make the big things - the things that really count - happen. But just like Abraham and Sarah, these dams don’t really work anymore in our lives than they did theirs.

There are many more in this category, and again, these come down to fear and pride. The fear that God won’t provide. The pride that we know better. 

2. Water Storage

Water storage is used in recreational reservoirs and irrigation, but I gave it its own category because water can be stored for a variety of reasons, including drinking water, more even distribution of water throughout a region, and fire control. This native Michigander got a glimpse of water shortages when I lived at a small mountain boarding school in Steamboat Springs, CO, and our taps regularly ran dry if there wasn’t enough run-off from rain or snow melt. A water truck often had to run up to refill our supply, but we were always careful to conserve what we could. It became understandable to me that certain regions would need to create a more reliable source for water through dams.

During the Exodus from Egypt, God had provided water from a rock, manna from the dew, and quail from the sky each day, and the Israelites could gather as much as they needed for that day, but whatever they hoarded was rotted overnight. This was an arduous lesson in trusting in the Lord to provide that we all must learn, often through white-knuckling hope. Jesus knew our propensity to fret about daily water and food. In describing Himself as the Bread of Life in John 6:35, He spoke to our need for not just sustenance, but the assurance that it would come, and He taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer, asking for daily bread, not bread to store up.

In our hearts, these dams are produced by the fear that God will not provide for us in times of need. We get stingy with our time, our money, and our love. This might look like storing away a lot of money and refusing to be generous with our resources. It can look like refusing to lend a helping hand and placing unreasonable expectations on others about the fulfillment of our own plans. We might store up friendships and refuse to extend invitations to those we know could use some community, for fear that our own community will change or disappear. Hypothetically speaking, there could be a pandemic that causes people to hoard toilet paper and cleaning products. We may not be willing to make changes in our lives for fear of losing the comfort we have stored up, and we may subscribe to ideologies that are not from the Lord, but which sound good to us when we’re on the beneficial side of them. 

I was recently introduced to the term “holy hoarding”, which refers to those who believe they have all of the spiritual answers and are not open to listening to other points of view. Essentially, they believe their understanding of God is complete and that everyone else has it wrong, and they build a sense of security around this superior image, rather than on the grace of Jesus. The Pharisees were much like this, believing they had every answer and key to finding favor with God, and it “coincidentally” secured their monetary, political, and spiritual power over the Jewish population. Jesus came in and blew all that up, to say the least.

Wives, I’m going to pick on your for a second, because we’re such holy hoarders. We have this inclination in us to tell our husbands what they need to do, think, read, and give up in order to have a good, full life following Jesus. We mean well enough, but we’re not trusting God to do the work of sanctification, and we’re not trusting our husbands to lead and to hear from the Lord on their own. One of the best reminders I got from a friend when I was going through my divorce was, “You are not the Holy Spirit for your husband.” It can be so easy to get our critical little spirits worked up into a self-righteous frenzy, but this is neither Biblical nor helpful. 

Last year, I sat in a Sunday school where the pastor placed all churches on a “spiritual spectrum”. He placed his own church on the “absolutely saved” side of things and another church that rejected Christ on the “not saved at all” end. (I can’t disagree with that particular assessment.) Then he proceeded to explain that from the “not saved” side, we can place people like the Episcopals as “kind of getting some things right”, then the Charismatics as “sort of saved”, the Methodists (but not all) somewhere in the middle, etc. Interestingly enough, these super-saved heroes, in the two months I attended the church, demonstrated no meaningful outreach of time, resources, or a Gospel message. Some churches heavily rely on the doctrine of predetermination as a means to forgo evangelism. We tell ourselves that faith is personal, and that most people around us have had a chance to know Jesus and simply rejected Him. Ugh, those dam lies. This is holy hoarding, and it’s not the mission of Christ. 

There’s a quote floating around there that goes something like, “Faith is meant to be a river, not a reservoir.” Ultimately, if our faith looks like it’s being withheld from flowing into the Kingdom of God for the purpose of preserving our own lives and comforts, then we’re a bunch of dam reservoirs, not rivers. 

3. Recreation

Dams create reservoirs for water supply, but these bodies of water have become sources of recreation for many. The Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River was finished in 1963, creating Lake Powell and covering the once-marvelous Glen Canyon. (Notice how “Lake Powell” has a better ring than “Reservoir Powell”?) Depending on the size and access to the body of water, people may use the reservoirs to boat, fish, swim, build their reservoir houses, and develop hotels and businesses for tourism. 

In short, the water storage systems we have used to supply our daily needs have become entire economic sectors in both our nation and our hearts, because we have utterly built our lives around them, long after their production of basic provision, power, or protection has become obsolete. 

Consider this passage from Matthew 19:16-22:

Now behold, one came and said to Him, “Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?”

So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He said to Him, “Which ones?”

Jesus said, “‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”

The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept from my youth. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”

But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Did you catch that? This young man had kept every commandment, but he had a stronghold of wealth to which he was greatly attached. 

But it’s not just wealth. I’ll use a personal example that I enjoyed the recreation of sin in my early 20s. Some sins in particular were very difficult for me to abandon once I gave my life to Christ, because I did not believe that life could or would be any fun without them. As I have attempted to evangelize others, I’ve found that there are plenty of things people believe they will have to give up to follow Jesus - things they know are sinful or vehicles that produce great sin in their lives - that they don’t want to relinquish. If we build our lives on getting raging drunk on the weekends and sleeping around, and we believe that they will become devoid of meaning, fun, friendship, and adventure if we follow Jesus, then yeah, we’ve got strongholds.  

This stronghold can be so intense. I’m looking at our national credit card debt skyrocketing to $1.08 trillion, with only 51% of folks being confident they can pay off their December debt in full. I see that we store up possessions to create an image for ourselves, buying cars we can’t afford to drive, homes we can’t afford to furnish, and bodily adornments that put us in crippling debt. Zeb and I recently listened to an interview on George Kamel where a couple was in $127,000 of credit card debt that they had acquired by buying stuff for their home and going on vacations they couldn't afford. They had an additional $80,000 on a 2023 car, which tells me they already had the crippling credit card debt before they decided to increase it by nearly 63%. 

Somewhere between our pride that we are entitled to a certain lifestyle and our fear that people won’t think we’re rich and fabulous if we live within our means is a dirty, rotten old dam in our hearts. We go on social media to develop narratives that we want the world to believe, and we wonder why we’re so unknown and unseen. But we’re putting out that image to others, and that’s what matters more to so many who are suffering in these dam reservoirs. 

We get stuck in the wrestling of having it all - Jesus AND the lifestyle. Maybe Jesus could provide for our lavish vacations so that we don’t have to have the anxiety of debt hanging over us. Jesus on Sunday and me the rest of the week. Jesus must have meant material goods when He meant “blessed”; I think I’ll buy a shirt that says it in script letters! 

But we can’t have the canyon and the reservoir. We have to choose. The goal is to walk toward Him in freedom, not away from Him in sadness, but that’s what we’ll do if we don’t see what a burden these strongholds create. (I’ll talk more about this in week 3.) 

4. Flood Control

Some dams serve as flood control, such as in the state of Tennessee, which prevents floods in key areas of the state that are most vulnerable to this natural disaster. The Natural Resource Conservation Services says that they produce around $1.7 billion in flood prevention benefits each year, which also serves to prevent erosion and protect wildlife habitats in some areas. The benefits are not money gained, but money not lost, meaning that these dams prevent loss of life and property and structural damage. 

Boy do we have strongholds here, my friends. It’s honestly hard to find an example of a Biblical character who can help us illustrate this one, because I don’t think there’s ever been a time in history that people have been so in denial about the reality of suffering as a normal part of life. (And just so you know I’m packing with this opinion, I have a history degree from the #2 history program in the United States, and I taught all kinds of history for 12 years.)

When I’ve gone through periods of suffering, I am often met with questions about unbelief, a lack of faith, a lack of trust in Jesus, poor knowledge of God’s promises and the Bible, poor daily rhythms, poor study practices, lack of commitment to community or the Church, and a plethora of other denial-based responses that suffering could possibly happen to someone who doesn’t deserve it, simply as a condition of being a frail human in a fallen world. 

Oh wait, we’ve got some perfect Biblical examples in Job’s dam friends! The story goes that Job was a righteous man whom the Lord allowed Satan to come against in order to prove that he would not curse God if his children, his material possessions, and his health were taken from him. (Job was a man of few strongholds.) His friends came to him and believed that he had done something wrong to incur the wrath of God. They accused him of sin that brought on his suffering, then rebuked him for the pride of confessing he had none. To them, they could not fathom that God would allow the righteous to suffer a catastrophe. Later, in John 9:2, Jesus was asked by His disciples whether a blind man or his parents had sinned and caused his blindness, so it’s clearly an enduring belief, even to the modern day. 

We go to tremendous lengths not to suffer, and our definition of suffering (and trauma) is getting broader and shallower by the day, ever expanding our efforts to avoid them. Many of us have put up healthy and wise boundaries to protect our hearts, but we also go far beyond that as well. When my first husband left, I swore, “I will never get married again.” (This turned to, “It will take an act of God for me to get married again,” which turned to an act of God causing me to get married again.) My motive was to protect myself from ever being hurt and going through the turmoil of that suffering again. A major fear I had was of the unknown, and if I made a declaration about what the future could look like, then I could be certain that I would avoid future rejection, even if it also meant I would not have the husband and family I had always desired.

We are great at building these dams. We fill up our schedules with appointments so that we’re never bored or lonely. We build homes equipped with everything so we never have to do without. We get fillers and botox so we never have to face the aging process. We surround ourselves only with people who build us up and enhance our own lives - here’s looking at you, divorce rate - so that we don’t have to learn how to compromise. In fact, I increasingly see and hear of many educators being discouraged from teaching grit and allowing students to wrestle with problem-solving, because it’s becoming ingrained in our beliefs that even our children should never have to suffer in any way, or it’s trauma. 

And probably the worst, we avoid stepping into the suffering of others so that we don’t have to feel the empathetic discomfort of being sad, walking through hard times with someone else, or bearing others’ burdens. Sometimes we assure ourselves, “I’m really not equipped to walk through this with them,” but what we mean is, “I don’t like the idea of getting that uncomfortable.” Other times, we try to push people to heal faster than what is possible, because we can’t stand the ongoing pain of waiting on what God is doing in this person’s heart and life. And we’ll excuse ourselves from repenting of just about any sin as long as we “meant well” or “didn’t hurt anybody” with our actions. 

In a spiritual sense, we convince ourselves that evangelism is a specific gift and exempt ourselves from the cringey discomfort of trying to share the Gospel, protecting ourselves from potential odd looks in place of the admiration we crave, and Heaven forbid we put ourselves in the vulnerable position of being persecuted for the beliefs that Jesus has given us the life we are now using to deny Him. Y’all, I’m preaching to myself here, too.

We leave churches when things get messy or when the music isn’t quite up to par, literally because we can’t stand to suffer 15 minutes of someone crowing acoustic 80s worship songs. We refuse to bring our authentic selves for fear that our vulnerability will open up space for people to gossip or hurt us. And we choose the neighborhoods we live in based on what they can do for our financial or social comfort, rather than what we can do to serve those around us. 

We do this so much, even down to the denial of suffering. I have seen friends come out of serious seasons of drug use, jail time, and family upheaval with new faith in Jesus, but they very quickly want to jump ahead to the part where they’re completely healed, because they know when the dam comes down, it’ll be so painful to face the fallout of what they did or what was done to them. (I’m going to talk more about this in week four.) 

Even in the most minimal ways, we are flood dammers. Do you walk on eggshells or act passive aggressively to avoid the pain of direct confrontation? Have you ever avoided taking a good risk out of fear for what you might lose? 

Think of Jonah in the belly of that fish, trying to avoid the suffering of seeing his enemy redeemed by God. Think of David killing Uriah the Hittite to avoid facing the consequence of impregnating his wife. John Mark deserting Paul and the other early disciples in the face of persecution. 

Oh, we are so good at flood control. 

5. Hydroelectric Power

Dams are also used for hydroelectric power and accounts for about 6.2% of the U.S. nation’s electrical supply in the modern day. Although the return is diminishing greatly as time goes on due to competition with other renewable energy sources like wind and solar, some are staunchly devoted to a revival of hydroelectric dams. 

The Pharisees were a group of people who wielded a great amount of spiritual, social, economic and political power in the time of Christ. Similar to holy hoarding, power hoarding also kept them confident in their own positions of authority over the people, seemingly untouchable to the masses with all of their titles and possessions secure, and continually fueled by the corrupt systems in which they remained at the top. At the very heart of their ministry was a works-based gospel - a message that said, “You have to earn God’s favor through perfect works.” 

Our pride is a very powerful driver, whether we are trying to build ourselves up to literally wield power over others’ thoughts and behaviors by gaining powerful positions in the world, or whether we are just trying to shape what others think about us through the narratives we carefully craft for ourselves, and everything in between. 

These dams can be driven by fear - a quick grab for control when we feel vulnerable that may result in us lobbing hateful words or bringing up old wounds to avoid having to apologize for our own actions. They can include bitterness we harbor toward others as we refuse to forgive them, because that bitterness gives us a sense of superiority and helps us avoid the hard work of moving forward after being hurt. They can also include a denial of suffering or refusal to accept ministering from others. People cover up their pain and trials in order to save face, rather than reaching for life-giving community, even though we know that the deepest hurts to us are the ones most commonly shared among humans. 

This can also take on the saddest form of our faith - that which is works-based, believing that we need to do so much more than believe Jesus in order to receive salvation. To continually generate the energy to earn our way into heaven through good works, rather than relying on the sufficiency of Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross. We say things like “come as you are” in our churches, but some of us are tempted to fill up space on every serve team in order to prove our worth, and we may even feel jealousy of those who are asked to be part of a team that we were not, bringing up feelings of bitterness, rather than seeing that every part of the body needs to fulfill a role. 

Ananias and Sapphira were early church members who had a lot of wealth. They sold a piece of property, and each lied to the apostles by saying they had given all of the money to the church, when they had actually kept a portion for themselves. They died for their lies, not because the money should have all gone to the church, but because it was already theirs, provided by God, and they lied to the church to build up their own reputations and hoarded to protect themselves. They were just like Judas, who stole from the money box, but paraded around as a disciple of Jesus. They wanted the reputation and influence, perhaps even the miraculous power, that God provided, but were not willing to lay down their lives for it. 

How many of us see ourselves in this story? That going to church or serving in a soup kitchen is some kind of protective power to make up for what we know is wrong in our lives, but which we think God has not seen? How many of us spend more time looking pious and devout than simply and humbly serving others, not letting our left hand know what our right hand is doing? 

6. The Dams of Old

There is a final category I see as well - the one that is obsolete, no longer serving a function but to hold back the damage that it created. The Matilija Dam on the Ventura River in California is a dam so clogged with sediment that it is currently non-functional, and there are no viable plans for making it run again. However, the dam has not been removed because the problems that keep it from functioning have created barriers to removing it. So it just sits there in decay as a team of stakeholders try to figure out what to do with it. 

Some are so old that we can’t even remember what they were supposed to do in the first place. The Sabin Dam in Traverse City was constructed in 1906 as a hydroelectric dam, and it was rebuilt and expanded twice by 1930, but eventually abandoned by 1960. So it just sat there with a dead pond above it that no one could use for recreation because it was so filled with algae, bacteria, and pollution. Festering waters that just sat there for decades. 

Paul spent a lot of time in his letters addressing pervasive thoughts and beliefs that contradicted the righteousness of God and the truth of the Gospel. Almost every letter he wrong corrected misconceptions among churches, because their former beliefs endured and disrupted the Gospel they had received. Even Peter had to face his own long held beliefs in a dream in Acts 10 when he declared to God that he had never eaten anything unclean, but God rebuked him and told him not to call anything unclean that He had cleansed, meaning that he needed to pursue the Gentiles as passionately as he had the Jews, despite his prejudices.

Generational sins, unbiblical thought patterns, and deeply held beliefs about ourselves and others dam up our lives, and sometimes we don’t even know where they came from or even that they’re there, making them particularly difficult to remove, because we cannot envision a life in which they are not true. 

In a family where the pervasive belief has always been to elevate the boys and discourage the girls, a stronghold may exist in both the male and female offspring that leads to self-destructive behaviors, poisonous relationship dynamics, and difficulty receiving God’s truth about men and women. When a father abandons his family, that creates a dam of lies about his wife and kids’ worth. When a child is born into serious poverty, a dam goes up that life is an ongoing trial of scarcity. My own grandparents hoarded butter and creamer from restaurants until the end of their lives, because they had lived through the Great Depression. 

My depressive episodes often come down to a stronghold I am incapable of removing on my own. “I am worthless. I am stupid.” The two sentences replay in my head over and over and over through different scenarios, as if Satan hit “roll tape” on my testimony to re-narrate the steps God has led me to take. And let’s make it clear, Satan doesn’t really care if I do or don’t believe it. If it were more fruitful for him to get me to believe I’m worth more than a billion other people and I’m the most brilliant person who ever lived, He’d spend more effort building up my pride than twisting the knife in my wounds. His main goal is to undermine God, and he takes it very seriously. 

I couldn’t begin to tell you where those beliefs came from in the first place - maybe an epigenetic pattern in my biology, or maybe a series of events that told me I am less loved and cared for than others, or a series of decisions that led me to less worldly success than I was capable of obtaining. No matter the origin, I know this does not align with what God says, and so it prevents the living, loving water of Jesus Christ from flowing freely through me, and it is my duty to make every effort to break this dam with the help of the Holy Spirit.  

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So where are your strongholds? My dear friend Mandy talks about never purchasing something she would not be able to give away. Perhaps your strongholds lie in that principle - what would make you walk away sad if Jesus asked you to give it up? What sin has hold of your life? What patterns of thinking have ruled the way you move through the world? What holds you back from following Jesus fully? Where do you spend most of your time, your money, your efforts? Don’t count out things like marriage and family, which can be the places we most strongly defend our dams.

I’m not asking you to do anything more this week than to identify an area or areas of your life that may be dammed up. Perhaps it is as simple as praying this passage from Psalm 139:23-24:

Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

There is much hope here, and this photo where the Boardman River Dam used to hold a reservoir called the Keystone Pond can serve as a little Easter egg for the upcoming weeks.

Friends, next time we are going to talk about what these physical and spiritual dams really do to our rivers and our lives as we discuss a bunch of dam myths. 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.