It’s a long walk to the water, the lake lower than I can ever remember on the Fourth of July. Yellow daisies blanket the lake bed like Grandma’s bedspread all covered with cheery flowers. A nearly dry riverbed, revealed in all its rocky glory, snakes through the heart of the shrinking reservoir. This land exposed I’ve never seen.

There is honesty in drought.

Underneath this lake lies an old homestead in this mountain valley where a family built a life before the government built a lake. Before the state took the valley to create the reservoir for fishing and swimming and hydro-electric power, forcing the family somewhere else.

More than half a century later, I walk the lake bed over dried moss that cushions my steps. There is softness here when you look for it. And a thousand deer tracks. Even the animals know to make this long journey to the water to live.

I’ve come to this lake almost every summer for 46 years. My grandparents built their cabin and dock here nearly fifty years ago. I caught my first trout here. Ate my first s’more here. Did my first hike here. Up the highest mountain to the top, a red bandana wrapping my long red hair, my little girl legs trembling from the climb. And then victory as I looked out over the lake far down in the distance. So beautiful in the distance. Shimmering blue in the distance.

Blue where I water-skied as a teenager. Paddled a canoe. Skinny-dipped with my cousins. Just us girls giggling in the freezing water with stars spilt like diamonds across the velvet night.

It’s been a long dry season. Years of very little rain in California. The mountains are parched. The forest animals panting. The pine trees browning with thirst.

I understand this dryness.

It has happened to my soul.

When blessings cease and trials flow. One thing after another until you wonder where God is in all this. Why your prayers bounce back in your face. Does God even hear you crying out his name?

The Lord gives and takes away, blessed be his name. Job 1:21.

It’s so easy to praise when God is giving. So hard to praise when he’s taking away.

During this dry season of my life, God even stripped my horses away. I thought they were gone for good. “I love you,” I told Jesus anyway, sobbing on my bedroom floor one day. “No matter what you take away, I will still love you. I have set my heart to always love you, Lord.”

“God isn’t doing this to you,” said a Christian friend trying to comfort me in the midst of my drought. “God didn’t give you cancer. He didn’t give you that breakdown. He didn’t give you those medical bills that sucked your savings bone dry. God’s not like that.”

God’s not like that…

But then I sat with the book of Job, and Job knew and I knew–deep down in my heart knew– God is like that… Sometimes he takes away.

Sometimes God causes severe winds of trial to blow upon his children to develop their gifts. Just as a torch burns more brightly when waved back and forth, and just as a juniper plant smells sweetest when thrown into the flames, so the richest qualities of a Christian often arise under the strong winds of suffering and adversity. Bruised hearts often emit the fragrance that God loves to smell. From streams in the Desert, a devotional I read every day.

And so after the tears, I praised God. Because praise isn’t about me. And it isn’t about you.

Praise is always about God.

The Maker of heaven and earth.

The Maker of drought and rain.

It took this drought for me to honestly see that no matter what, I loved God. To the bottom of my rocky, ravaged heart, I still loved God. And in response, Jesus assured me: Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Neither death nor life, neither angels or demons, neither the present or the future, nor any powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38.

And rain will come. I know it will come. Because God is good that way.

My lovely daughter Lacy hiking the lake with me in July.