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Friday of the First Week of Advent

December 6

This Week's Scripture Readings:

Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

Watershed Land Patterns

In the 2016 essay collection Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice, contributor Ched Myers writes about the importance of watersheds to ecological survival. Water’s journey can be traced through the land’s topography. From its original source, draining from peaks and ridges along a waterway or stream, to its end point in a pond, lake or ocean, water shapes and maps our land. “A watershed,” writes Myers, “is the area covered in water’s journey . . . a unique mix of habitats that influence each other, including forests, wetlands, fields and meadows, rivers and lakes, farms and towns. All human life is watershed-placed.”


Wherever humans reside – urban, suburban, rural – our lives and our communities are patterned by watersheds.


Myers laments the growth of urban and industrial areas designed to accommodate traffic patterns, housing tracts and political borders. These patterns render nature and nature’s design secondary or altogether invisible, stressing and stretching our relationship to land and water, bringing us to the brink of ecological and social collapse. Myers, a Christian activist and educator, advocates for a return to the “art, science, and theology of ‘biomimicry.’ We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere, and only the map that is woven into Creation can lead us home. And that map is defined by watersheds.”


Myers implores us to consider new questions that take seriously the patterns of Creation. How might our politics change if boundaries were determined by nature rather than legislature? How might our city’s development change if we honored our relationship with nature and nature’s patterns? How might our international relations change if we understood ourselves as patterned and bound together by water and land?

Prayer: Holy God, Creator of land, water and nature’s bounty, open our hearts and minds to the ecological patterns you prepared for us. Help us follow your waterways to the new and abundant life you desire for us and all Creation. Amen.

These devotions come from a book of the same name published by The Presbyterian Outlook. Hard copies of the devotional book are available around the church.