Commentary
It is still dark outside and raining hard. I am sitting at my kitchen counter, waiting to hear from the well company. We are praying it’s an electrical issue, but if not, the well has to be pulled today.
There are already about 100 people on the land—volunteers, staff, subcontractors—all preparing for our annual Confluence festival. In a few days, that number will grow to more than 1,000. Yesterday morning, the well stopped working. No water, no flushing toilets, no showers, and no easy fix. So this morning we are catching rainwater off the roof and carrying it in buckets to flush toilets, one trip at a time, trying to stay ahead of a problem that does not wait.
And it is not just the well. It is pouring rain. My husband got a flat tire on the refrigerator truck on the way to pick up food. The road crossing the creek washed out and needed repair. We found out it’s not an easy electrical fix. The well does need to be pulled, and the guys from Buddys Well and Septic worked on it all day, pulling all 400 feet and replacing the wire. They took breaks every time lightning rolled in, because a well rig is essentially a lightning rod.
We have seen this before. In past years, the main electrical panel in our conference building burned out right before guests arrived. One year, someone drove over a septic tank and collapsed it. It starts to feel like a pattern. When the stakes are high, something big always seems to go wrong. So the question arises: is it just inevitable? When you put this much strain on a system, when you gather this many people onto one piece of land, does it simply expose every weakness? Is this what happens when something real gets pushed to its limits?
Or is it something deeper? Is there a moment, every time, where you have to prove how badly you want it? Where the vision is not enough, and you are asked to meet it with effort, grit, and a willingness to keep going when things break? Or is it something harder to define, a push and pull between forces we do not fully understand, where resistance shows up at the exact moment something meaningful is about to happen?
I do not know the answer, but I know what I am seeing. For every problem that has shown up, more people have shown up. My mother is here. My partners in this event are here. Volunteers who have come year after year are here. Friends from Galveston have moved in for three weeks just to help. Chef Shon Foster flew in from Utah, a chef on the edge of being named Restaurateur of the Year, and he is standing in the rain helping collect water off the roof so we can flush toilets. Neighbors and friends, people I grew close to during the floods in Kerr County, have brought their RVs onto the property to help us see this through.
Prayer is everywhere. You hear it on the radios, people asking everyone to pause and pray for this or that throughout the day. There is something about doing hard things together that brings that out in people. Everywhere you look, work is happening—people carrying buckets, fixing roads, extending internet lines, updating point-of-sale systems, stocking shelves, prepping food, raising tents in the mud.
It is easy to focus on what is going wrong: the well, the rain, the road, the truck, the strain on every system. But what I see is a community showing up. There is something remarkable about 100 people working toward a common goal in the pouring rain, not because it is easy, but because it matters. Serving is the point, and as we get ready to serve more than 1,000 people here on the ranch, the community has shown up to serve us.
When I started writing this article, we were without water in the pouring rain. About 36 hours later, the water is back on. In that time, everyone came together and worked—through the rain, through the mud, through flat tires and washed-out roads, through exhaustion and uncertainty—solving one problem at a time until the system came back online. There was no single moment where it all turned, just steady effort, shared responsibility, and a refusal to stop.
This morning, I stood in the shower as hot water ran down my face, and I was struck by how easy it is to take something so simple for granted. To turn on a faucet, to flush a toilet, to have water flow when you need it—these are the kinds of things that disappear into the background of daily life until they are gone. Standing there, I found myself saying a quiet prayer of gratitude, not just for the water, but for the people—for the ones who showed up, who stayed, who carried buckets, fixed roads, pulled pipe, and kept going in the pouring rain.
It reminded me how easy it is to take both for granted, and how important it is not to.
