Hauling water...

Remember trying to carry water from the lake to your sand castle in a little red wagon? Have you ever driven livestock to market... pulled a horse trailer...? I am not sure if one is harder than the other, but for me, there is nothing quite like hauling water.

At my present age and post knee surgery, I pride myself on still being able to carry a full, 20 liter (5.283 Gal) water jug upstairs to the kitchen and flip it onto its base for dispensing. It weighs about 44 Pounds. It's an even greater accomplishment if I don't spill any water in the process.

In many parts of the world, including Cancun, some people depend on water trucks running regular routes to areas of town where the population still has no access to public utilities (lights, sewer and water)... or to construction sites. If you drive by the water company, you see the trucks lined up to get filled up and back on the road again.

You can hear them coming, diesel powered, with capacities somewhere in the range of 2400-4000 gallons. It only takes about 269 gallons of water to make a ton, so do the math... they are heavy loads. They are heavy, sloshing loads... on typically rough, uneven roads. Water trucks have to be built tough. A mishap that would cause a fully loaded truck to lose its load would make quite a mess.

So, here is my question: what are the mechanics behind transporting oceans of water in an orderly fashion without it turning into utter chaos and destruction? How come random tsunamis, or worse, are not our daily bread?

A few details from HOW STUFF WORKS:

• There's a whole lot of water on Earth. Something like 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of the stuff can be found on our planet.
• About 70 percent of the planet is covered in ocean, and the average depth of the ocean is several thousand feet (about 1,000 meters).
• Ninety-eight percent of the water on the planet is in the oceans,... About 2 percent of the planet's water is fresh.
• Only about 0.036 percent of the planet's total water supply is found in lakes and rivers. That's still thousands of trillions of gallons, but it's a very small amount compared to all the water available.

I confess that I did not attempt to verify this information. But even if you allow a variable of + or - a few trillion gallons, that's still a lot of water.

How much does the water weigh? What does it take to keep that much water so well contained on a revolving ball in space, circling a bigger ball 93 million miles away? We spin with an equatorial rotation speed of 1,040 mph, we orbit at a speed of about 67,000 mph (a speed that would get you to the moon in four hours). Every year we travel 584 million miles.

That is some serious water hauling.

And there are other factors to consider:

• the slosh effect of that much moving liquid inside of another moving object (Slosh Dynamics)... something that water trucks, cargo ships and spacecraft contend with.
• the interplay among things like gravity and the pull of sun and moon
• a myriad of additional unquantifiable components necessary to a rhythm of high and low tide.
• a refined consistency that sustains the presence of unique, stable ecosystems distinctive to tidal areas...

How do you explain it? Who is the master geophysicist that put this balancing act, this cosmic ballet, in motion?

This is not a middle school science class. I just want to demonstrate that I arrive at the notion of a creating, supreme being long before any discussion of how spiders, seals, eagles, pandas and humans got here.

Even though the evidence of sin, imperfection and decay surrounds us, we should say thank you once in a while. Nothing of our astonishingly predictable existence would be possible were it not for a sustaining, controlling power far beyond our comprehension.

And to think that the underlying motive of said supreme being was: redeeming love. Someone that can bring about and maintain in motion what we live, see and breathe every moment, can also preserve his word for the ages, reveal it to the objects of his love and bring believers in His Son home to live with Him forever.

“Blessed be the name of the LORD

from this time forth and for evermore.”

(Ps 113:2)

-------