When the Dam Ran Dry: Answered Prayer

It is all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea with my story of lasting water. Welcome to Miracles in the 21st Century. I'm Mark Pearce. So the story that I want to tell you about today occurred when I was a young person on a cattle station in northwestern Queensland. There we had— my parents owned the station, and this happened in the drought of 1982. So it wasn't this century, but it's certainly in my lifetime. And what I remember happened was this: the drought came on, which meant the water supply in the dams began to drop. And our property had 4 dams. This particular paddock had one dam which all the cows went to for water. And in August of that year, the water supply in the dam kept getting lower and lower until eventually the water in the dam itself dried up. Now, what needs to be understood though is there was a windmill That pumped the water out of the dam into a smaller little water, water receptacle that, for reasons I don't know or understand, was called a turkey's nest. So the turkey's nest was higher above the dam, and the windmill would pump the water from the dam into the turkey's nest. And from there it would go through a pipe at the bottom out into a water trough for the cattle to drink from. And there were some 400 head of cattle that would come to this particular dam to drink water. So it was in August of 1982 and the dam went dry. The turkey's nest held 3 days' water supply. We knew that it only had 3 days' water in it. Now, my father was a man of faith and he knew of the story in the Bible where the mother of 2 sons was afraid that her sons were going to be taken from her to pay a debt that her husband had incurred, and he had died. And the prophet Elisha said to her, get the oil that you have in your jar and just pour it into other pots and keep going. And that little cruise of oil filled many much larger pots of oil. And so my father knew this story and he prayed that God would preserve the water in the turkey's nest. It should have lasted 3 days and then it should have been all gone. Day 1, the turkey's nest level, the water in the turkey's nest dropped. Day two, it dropped again. Day three, it stayed at that level. It stayed at that level the next day. The cows were still coming to drink water. They came every day. They kept drinking the same amount of water. But the turkey's nest stayed at that level for three for two weeks. For two weeks, it stayed at that level, and the cattle were still coming and drinking every day. August in Northern Australia is the dry season. That's the time of year where it doesn't rain, particularly in the northwest of Queensland. And in the northern of us— north area of Australia, there doesn't rain hardly at all. So in August of 1982, after the dam had gone dry, Unseasonable rain came. It poured rain and it put 4 foot of water into that dam after it had been dry. And that turkey's nest had been supplying the cattle with water for 2 weeks after it went dry. That was miraculous. It should not have happened. And yet I know that it did. So miracles aren't restricted to what we find written in the Bible or in other stories that have happened many, many, many, many years ago. God still works, and you can never be sure where he's likely to show up.