The biggest excitement on the ranch is the monsoon rains filling the valley and bringing in the river. We have had a solid flow for about a week straight, with a few intermittent flows before that. The first rains are always building up the aquifers as the valleys continue to saturate and fill up. Now everything is full, and every time a new flow comes in I am out the door to survey the entire ranch learning and understanding what the San Pedro is up to. 

   Water is so amazing! Watching the way it moves, watching all of the things it forces to move, and seeing the few that are not moved. It is incredible what you can learn from sitting and contemplating the dynamics unfolding before you. It always makes me humble and it washes away my worries. To know what God is always doing, to see the life that God is constantly creating all around me. I feel his invitation to participate, to humble myself and take my position correctly. To work hard with joy in my heart, to trust God with my family and my fears, knowing that he has ordered the universe around us, every single part, from the micro to the macro; unimaginable, unpredictable, and so amazingly wonderful, as frustrating and frustrated as it may be.

I love it. 

I keep building a list: Experiences I recommend, you must experience before you leave this life. 

Holding an innocent child until they fall deep asleep in your arms.

Waking up next to someone you love so much it makes you actually forget about yourself for a moment. 

Closing your eyes and being completely caught up by the power of music, especially if you are actually playing an instrument, or singing with your own voice.

There are a lot of them, and I will probably write about them here sometime. 

But there is one I have already mentioned, flowing through the ranch right now. 

We all grew up in the desert. I was born at St. Joes, and Becca was born in Phoenix. All our lives, under the heat of the relentless summer. The kind of heat that actually kills people. You can feel it suck the life out of you sometimes, on those long days when you have to keep going, and you know you aren't gonna stop going till you're finished. Day after day, the heat is on, hotter and hotter. Hotter and hotter. 95, then 100, then 105, then the heat warnings for the tourists. 

But there's something incredible that happens when the clouds come in and the thunder starts cracking open the summer sky above you. It's like watching a miracle every single year. No one understands the rain like when you see the first monsoons break in the desert. When you hear the first drops popping off, smacking the surface of the deadest dirt you can ever imagine, like watching two opposing worlds collide for the first time. The smell of the Creosote fills my heart with nostalgia, and it seems like within a second everything all the sudden looks green.  You should never curse the rain in the desert. 

This type of experience is so profound when you can actually see the river come in for the first time. I hope everyone gets a chance to sometime. A river flowing in the desert. It makes me very grateful for the life we have, and it makes me want to be tough, like all the life around me. I know we serve a good God, because he never stops doing amazing things. We just decide to look and see it, or not.

"A wise man has eyes in his head, while the fool walks in the darkness." Ecclesiastes 2:14a

"I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts." Revelations 21:6