WHEN THE JANUARY 12 EARTHQUAKE rocked Haiti, the country was already struggling with a chronic water shortage, with nearly half the people lacking access to safe, clean drinking water. The quake has since made direr a problem that entire organizations and websites had been specifically devoted to addressing. In the aftermath of the disaster, water's essential role as a most basic human need demands new attention.

How many of us have stopped to consider this most precious resource? To give thanks for whatever we do have of it, and to consider a future in which there's enough of it for an increasingly thirsty planet? Pure water is vital to sustenance—for drinking, cooking, and cleanliness. It is essential to agriculture and industry. A sufficient water supply is foundational to the economic security of cities and nations, and this has been the case since ancient times. But while water covers three quarters of the earth's surface, only 2.5 percent of it, a good deal of which is locked up in glaciers, is fresh.

In the prologue to his new book, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, author Steven Solomon notes that water is growing scarcer worldwide because of overuse and pollution. "As a result," he says, "an explosive new political fault line is erupting across the global landscape of the twenty-first century between water Haves and Have-Nots .... Simply, water is surpassing oil itself as the world's scarcest critical resource."

In the past few years there have been reports of clergy and even government officials making public prayers for rain in various drought-stricken areas. Sincere appeals to God in times of need are never incidental. But a more sustained and widespread prayerful effort is needed to address the growing global water crisis. Ultimately, all solutions will have their source in divine intelligence and power. In the words of Mary Baker Eddy, "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 494). God's—divine Love's—provision is impartial, not doled out unequally to haves and have-nots. Infinite divine power is of practical human help. But in order to see proof of this, we need to confront in prayer the evidence of water shortages that can seem downright overwhelming.

The book of Ezekiel describes a prophetic image of a water stream that issues form the house of the Lord and grows into a mighty river that spreads across the land, nourishing it with life, flowing into the stagnant sea and refreshing it: "And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live:... for they shall be healed" (47:9). Here is an image worth holding to in prayer about today's water wars—especially considering the Biblical significance of river. The Glossary of Science and Health says it represents a "channel of thought" (p. 593). Spiritually considered, there's a real connection between the world's need for clean, pure, abundant water and the way we think. Especially when it comes to vital resources, the more that individuals, and the nations they comprise, mentally attuned to the facts of God's abundance and loving care for all creation, the more people will be open to the ideas that lead humanity forward, beyond intractable problems and on to wise and practical solutions that bless everyone.

Jesus said: "Whosoever takes a drink of the water that I will give him shall never, no never, be thirsty any more. But the water that I will give him shall become a spring of water welling up (flowing, bubbling) [continually] within him unto (into, for) eternal life" (John 4:14, Amplified Bible). Christian Science explains that perceiving something of the healing Christ-message behind Jesus' words transforms human consciousness—and also the human circumstances that are in fact the outpicturing of that consciousness. In this way, when some needful thing is lacking, we can expect ideas to appear, as a result of individual and collective communion with God, that meet the need. Jesus taught that we can look to our relationship with God to find that we are created spiritually, not materially. He demonstrated that God's children can't be limited or bereft, because our reflection of God is forever unbroken. In the words of Science and Health, "The everlasting I AM  is not bounded nor compressed within the narrow limits of physical humanity, nor can He be understood aright through mortal concepts" (p. 256).

An example of how ideas can take shape practically can be seen in the way the state of Queensland in Australia has, through new conservation efforts, been able to dramatically reduce its daily water consumption during years of severe drought. New efforts are underway to reclaim rainfall and water runoff, and to bring down the cost of desalination and wastewater treatment. More creative and inspired solutions will become apparent and practical when each one of us opens up rivers of inspired thought, flowing with divine inspiration.

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