We need a miracle, so let’s take a minute to pray for rain

CAN You spare a minute?

Extreme situations require extreme measures. At the current rate of damwater replenishment (about 1% a week for the last month) it will take 55 weeks of rains to bring the dams back to 80% of capacity – the level required to lift water restrictions.

We don’t have 55 weeks of winter left. We have less than six. Any free-thinking person might agree that we have an extreme water crisis situation on our hands.

Whatever measures are being taken by the leaders of our city, spiritual as well as political, are neither visible or reassuring enough that their interventions aren’t going to prevent a calamity of incalculable proportions.

Other than more threats of fines on water “transgressors” the escalation of a multifaceted approach needs to be rolled out with the highest priority, even if it means circumventing “due process”.

The local government’s intentions to employ aquifer extraction, stormwater capture and desalination technology unless accompanied with relevant rollout figures reflecting realistic implementation within the next 3 months, is self-deluding political pie crust.

While such measures will help, given enough time, I believe it’s time to look beyond our human self-reliance and limitations and look to the badly neglected spiritual side of our situation.

The call for a day of prayer, as given coverage some months ago by the Cape Times, was well taken up with encouraging results, but seems to have lost traction with the current funnel vision with the water problem. We are exhorted in the Scriptures to “pray without ceasing” where relevant.

I wish to submit that the observation of a minute’s silence every day at a given time by all those affected by the drought should be called for.

The one-minute silence as implemented in World War II with King George VI and Winston Churchill’s support of one Major Wellesley Tudor Pole’s OBE persistent initiative, observed at 9pm every evening at the strike of Big Ben’s chimes and throughout the commonwealth countries, including South Africa (done at midday with the signal of the noon gun), was something that gave cognisance to the fact that the Allies realised they were no more masters of their destiny than we are.

The nine-day evacuation of tens of thousands of soldiers from Dunkirk in flat calm weather was considered a miracle, after a day of prayer called for by King George VI on the May 26, 1940.

It’s perhaps easier to pray when the enemy is so visible with such obviously evil intentions as the Nazis.

What we face is far more insidious – climate change – a situation of our own making plus the collective apathy of a deeply rooted and effective buck-passing system, where it’s always somebody else’s responsibility to sort the problem.

In some things only God can make the difference. Have you got a minute? Clive Redman Bergvliet