Recently, I went to Toronto, where I spent the weekend with a religious community called L'Arche. At L'Arche, able-bodied persons live in community with severely disabled persons as a witness to Christian love. It is a marvelous place, filled with the spirit of God. I stayed on the third floor of one of their houses. When I went into the bathroom, I noticed that the faucet was dripping. I could tell that it had been dripping for months or even for years, because where the water struck the sink, all the enamel had been worn away. There was a large ugly black circle of cast-iron, which was rusting without its protective coating.
I put a container under the drip to measure how much water was passing through. The leak filled a cup every three minutes. That's five quarts an hour. That means that every day they were losing thirty gallons of fresh spring water which they pumped from an underwater aquifer. Over a year they had lost eleven thousand gallons down the drain: drip, drip, drip.