Waiting for the water to fall

Genesis 8:18-22 

¹⁸ So Noah, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, came out. ¹⁹ All wildlife, all livestock, every bird, and every creature that crawls on the earth came out of the ark by their groups.
²⁰ Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. ²¹ When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, He said to Himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, even though man’s inclination is evil from his youth. And I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.
²² As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, and day and night
will not cease.”

     A couple of weeks ago I had a brief opportunity to fish a local tailwater for a few hours.  For those of you that aren't  familiar, a "tailwater" is the river below a hydro-electric dam. When the generators are on water gushes through the dam and you can drown and I don't wade there when they are on because I don't want to drown.  But, when the generators are turned off  the water recedes and the fishing is usually quite good.  On this particular day I arrived at the river while the generators were still running - and it was raining....  So, I found a place to comfortably sit and I waited for the generators to shut off and the water to fall.  As I sat in the rain on this cloudy, cold, ugly day I thought of Noah and his family and how long THEY had to wait for the water to fall.  But at the end of their wait they had a "new" creation", a new beginning, provided by God.  Thanks to Noah, mankind got a do-over.

     And the first thing Noah and his family did when they got off the ark to start this new beginning was to build an altar and worship.  So, this Sunday falls on New Years Eve and the following day is a new beginning.  Sounds like a great idea to start this new do-over with worship to the One who makes it possible.