THE SPRINKLER EFFECT

I love to garden, but I hate to water. The bane of summertime to me is watering. In the midsouth where we live, it gets HOT! We haven't even turned the calendar page to July yet and the heat indexes have been in the 100s this week. 107 for today, to be exact!

It doesn't take much of that kind of heat to bake your plants and to undo all the hard work you put into cultivating your flowers and plants. So the only alternative we have is to water relentlessly. Most gardening experts say you need to water once a week to a depth of one inch. Well, let me tell you that you can water to the depth of one inch today and 2 days from now, you will need to water again in this heat.

We have a very large yard...almost 2 acres. Now all of that is certainly not in flowers... a large part of it is yard...which is my husband's territory. But I do have quite a few beds that are all around the edges.

When we built our house in 2003 my husband installed a sprinkler system into the flower beds around the house. They worked great that first year, but as the plants and shrubs have grown he has continually had to re-adjust the sprinkler heads. I finally gave up on the front bed as it never seems to get the right amount of water or in the right place. The outer beds throughout the edge of the woods and around the shop all have to be watered another way as they do not have the sprinkler system.

Several years ago my husband devised a way to hook the sprinkler heads that you usually stick into the ground into a car jack so that we could move them around from bed to bed. Ingenious as it was, they are still heavy! The other alternative is to use a hose and keep lugging it back and forth from place to place. Neither way is fun.

The carjack sprinkler system is the easiest, no doubt, because you can set it and leave it. However, I began to watch how the water was thrown around and as I sat and watched it one day, I surmised that not much water was really getting to the depth of one inch. So I decided to conduct a little experiment. I took several Cool Whip bowls (better know here as Mississippi Tupperware) and placed them throughout the area being watered just to see how much water actually accumulated in them. Just as I suspected, it was about 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch, and that was after at least an hour of watering.

You see the problem with sprinklers is that it just throws enough water out there for it to "look" wet, yet not enough for it to really soak the ground. So the flowers lap that up in a few hours and the next day when the sun comes out, they bake again, starved for lack of water.

Some people are like that. They go to church on Sunday to get their weekly "sprinkling" of the Word. The preacher sprinkles a few words on them, they feel good for having gone to church and then they leave, never to pick up their Bible again til the next Sunday and the next sprinkling. During the week they get pummeled because they are all dried up for lack of the Word.

The only way for the Word of God to really take root in your heart is for you to soak in it, or as Max Lucado says "marinate your mind in it". The Word is designed to change us from the inside out. God promises that it will not return void. But, if we do not take the time to read it, to meditate on it, to soak in it, if you will, it will never do us much good.

When my garden only gets sprinkled, the flowers begin to wilt, leaves curl up, the ground begins to crack open and they will fail to produce any more flowers. If all you are getting in your life is a weekly sprinkling of the Word, your life will also be dry and will not produce the fruit God intended for you to produce. So, what kind of Christian are you? A soaked one or a sprinkled one?