When the River Rises

     Sometimes God does not part the waters.
Sometimes He asks us to walk through them — and let them carry away what we can no longer keep.

---

Collect

Gracious Father,
When the waters rise and the familiar shores disappear,
hold us steady in Your mercy.
Teach us how to release what we love
without losing hope in what You are doing.
In this Lenten season of surrender,
meet us in our grief,
and make the flood a place of holy transformation.
Through Christ our Lord, Amen.

---

Scripture Lessons

Old Testament
Book of Isaiah 43:2
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.”

Psalm
Book of Psalms 34:18
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

Gospel
Gospel of Matthew 16:25
“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

---

Devotional Reading

     In Chapter One of my novel, Midnight on the Ocmulgee, the river rises in the 1940 flood and sweeps through Hawkinsville, Georgia. Mary Tibbs Walker does not survive the waters. The town stands stunned. The Ocmulgee, once beautiful and familiar, becomes something fierce and untamable.

     When I first wrote that scene, it was historical fiction. When I edited it after my mother’s death in September 2025, it became something else.

It became confession.

     I had not been able to get off work the week before she passed. I did not make that final visit. That grief sat heavy in me for weeks — regret, sorrow, love, memory, all tangled together like debris after a storm.

At the same time, another flood was rising.

     Health issues forced me to leave the Deep South — the life I loved in Macon, Georgia. I had found a church home at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church. I had close friends. The warmth of that community felt rooted and real. Weekends at Tybee Island and the quiet beauty of Savannah were within reach. That rhythm had become home.

     But wounds on my feet would not heal. My body would not cooperate. I had to step away. I had to move back to Tennessee. I am facing a new career path now — one I did not plan.

When I reread Chapter One after those months, I wept for twenty minutes.

Because the flood in the novel was not just about 1940.

It was about me.

     Lent is a season of letting go. Not because loss is good — but because clinging to what God is asking us to release will drown us faster than the river itself.

The prophet Isaiah does not say, “If you pass through the waters.” He says, “When.” The promise is not avoidance. The promise is presence.

The river took Mary Tibbs Walker in my novel.
The river took my mother.
The river took my Georgia life.
The river is taking the last four years — the beautiful and the painful alike.

But the river does not get the final word.

Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel that losing your life is somehow the doorway to finding it. That is Lenten theology. That is cross-shaped hope.

Grief is not faithlessness. Tears are not weakness. Release is not defeat.

Sometimes release is obedience.

     In 2022, author and professor Kate Bowler, after walking through cancer and immense loss, wrote about the myth of “holding it all together.” She speaks instead of learning to live inside fragility — not with tidy answers, but with honest surrender.¹

     Her words echo what the flood has been teaching me:
We do not control the river.
We trust the One who walks with us through it.

This Lent, perhaps your river looks different.

Maybe it is:

• The death of someone you love.

• A job you had to leave.

• A dream that shifted.

• A body that is not cooperating.

• A home you had to say goodbye to.

The flood feels merciless when you are standing in it.

But Scripture says God is nearer in brokenhearted places than anywhere else.

And sometimes the flood is not punishment.

It is pruning.

It is release.

It is the strange mercy of God clearing space for resurrection.

---

Charge

This week, name what the river is taking from you.

Do not minimize it. Do not rush past it.

Lay it before God in honest prayer — and ask Him not to stop the waters, but to walk with you through them.

Release is not the end of your story.

It may be the beginning of healing.

---

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus,
You who walked on water and calmed the sea,
stand beside us in our rising rivers.

Hold the grief we cannot fix.
Receive what we must release.
Heal what is wounded in body and soul.

In this holy season of Lent,
teach us that letting go in You
is never losing —
but trusting.

Amen.

---

Footnote

1. Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) by Kate Bowler reflects on suffering, fragility, and faith after her stage IV cancer diagnosis.

---