For me, the big story these past weeks was not the wrath of God but the mercy of God. Disasters are, for me, not evidence of God’s non-existence but evidence of His divinity and power. That He can hold such forces in check by His sheer will. That, in the midst of such chaos, He knows every name of every person in the storm. Every heartbeat, every strand of hair on every head. Rather than ask why God would send a flood, we should be grateful for all the years God held the floods back.
For
me, the big story these past weeks
was not the wrath of God
but the mercy of God. Disasters are, for me, not evidence of
God’s non-existence but evidence of His divinity and power; that
He can hold such forces in check by His sheer will. In the midst
of such chaos, He knows every name of every person in the storm.
Every heartbeat, every strand of hair on every head. He made us.
Therefore, He surely must realize the greatness we are capable
of as well as the selfishness.
It’s always been my assertion that God’s grace extends to the
just and the unjust. People who deny God, people who live their
lives only for themselves, benefit from God’s mercy as much as
we who claim to know and love Him do. I believe mankind, saved
and unsaved, would experience a life-threatening shock if God
were to remove His divine presence from us. I believe His very
presence allows us to smugly go about our day, forgetting about
Him and even denying He exists; a denial that seems increasingly
ridiculous in the face of such larger-than-life events.
Rather than ask why God allows tragedy and catastrophe, the
thoughtful observer might look at things from the other end,
realizing that each and every day God extends His grace, what we
call unmerited favor, to saint and sinner alike. Rather than ask
why God would send a flood, for example, the more informed
thinker would be grateful for all the years God held the floods
back.
It’s not that a wrathful God is hurling bolts of lightning down
on us. Quite the opposite, He measures our circumstance and
routinely manages forces beyond our comprehension by his sheer
will, making it so that we have a sunny day to mow the yard and
go to Walmart. If we stop and think a moment, if we truly
consider how many billions of billions of seemingly random
elements must align themselves perfectly so that we can have
that sunny Walmart day, we’d likely all be a bit more grateful
to God, and that gratitude wouldn’t be a fleeting, exasperated
acknowledgement or the half-hearted three or four handclaps of
praise devotional leaders manage to beat out of us Sunday
morning, but would be the kind of gratitude that manifests
itself in productive use of our time, talents and treasure,
employed in the service of a God Who decided, for now, to hold
back chaos from our lives.
Many of us act as though we are entitled to these miracles;
these warm, sunny days. Many of us blame the tragedy of
Hurricane Katrina on God. How could God do this to us. When we
should be awed at God’s might and God’s mercy in that Katrinas
don’t happen every single week. We should be amazed meteors the
size of Texas don’t slam into the planet and wipe us out, or
that disease and famine has not visited us. Rather than curse
God for the times and places these things occur, rather than
consider ourselves somehow better or more worthy of His mercy
than the poor starving, AIDS-ravaged Africans, we should
recognize there is great misery, peril, and, yes, evil in this
world. Every day of our lives, God spares most of us from most
of that.
Shaking A Fist At God: They keep rebuilding in documented natural disaster zones.
Emotion Versus Intellect
While our hearts go out to every victim of the past week’s spate
of terrible storms, I am often perplexed by the
anti-intellectual emotionalism of many communities’ defiant
insistence on remaining within known danger zones, rebuilding
ruined homes over and over in the exact places where these
people know, for a fact, are likely to be hit again. People
rebuilding houses on flood plains, along earthquake fault lines,
or, as we’ve seen this past week, along the Kansas-Oklahoma
Tornado Alley, seem to be working against reason, shaking their
fist at ages-old mechanisms and mistaking bravery for illogic. I
mean, tornados touch down here. Get out. This is a flood plain;
it floods every single year. Stop building your house here. Stop
driving up everyone’s insurance by making claim after claim
after claim and insisting on rebuilding your house in the exact
same spot. If a meteor were headed toward earth, and scientists
could prove the thing would crash right through your roof at
thus-and-such a time, would you be home? Of course not. But
that’s what these people do, over and over, rebuild their homes
in disaster areas, knowing full well these are, in fact, areas
prone to natural disasters; disasters getting exponentially more
frequent and more ferocious because of global warming.
Every time I hear a (typically conservative, reactionary)
politician toting his party’s abdication-of-reason party line
that global warming is only a theory—in the face of virtual
unanimity among scientific scholars—it reminds me of the story
of Superman. Superman, as you likely know, came from a planet
called Krypton, whose own death knell was long-ignored by
super-advanced scientists for political reasons. Denying logic
and intellect for political reasons is the raison d'être of the
Republican Party, a political organization all but consumed by
emotionalism in ignorance of intellect. Like the ill-fated
Kryptonians, we are ignoring this planet’s distress, silencing
scientists and de-funding important research that could help
save the planet. Meanwhile, year after year, the storms get
worse, the hurricanes are stronger, and every successive year
sets a new record as being the hottest in recorded human
history.
These folks keep re-building their homes, with federal grants
(which means me and you) footing a lot of the bill, and
insurance claims (which ultimately mean me and you) covering
huge pieces of it. They know the tornado is coming, so, a ha,
they build a storm cellar. Why on earth build a home at all in a
place where you think you’d need a storm cellar? “Well, this is
where we’ve always lived,” “This is where we were raised,” “My
grampappy and his grampappy lived here, and we’re not movin’!”
Well, your grampappy and his grampappy were idiots. Every time
these folk hammer their homes back together and squat down, they
have decided their lives are worth more than those of the first
responders who will, inevitably, be summoned to rescue them when
they are clobbered yet again by the flood, the earthquake, the
hurricane, the tornado. It is, in its own way, not only stupid
but a sublime act of selfishness to deliberately place yourself
in harm’s way because, “This is where Pappy Anem lived.” You
are, in fact, forcing others to place their lives at risk to
come and save you, which someone inevitably will have to do.
I have a great deal of sympathy for victims and survivors of
such natural disasters, while also having a great deal of
contempt for people stupid enough, selfish enough, to
repeatedly, deliberately, plant themselves in harm’s way. This
is the ultimate expression of emotion over intellect. Somebody
should tell this folks, “Well, we can’t stop you from rebuilding
here, but next time no one’s coming to save you.” Insurers
should stop insuring these people. FEMA should stop cutting
checks to these people. The Red Cross should circulate notices
that, if you rebuild here, you are on your own.
Emotion is one of God’s great gifts to mankind, but we were
never meant to be slaves to it. God gifted us with reason and
with will. Emotion should make life richer and fuller, not make
us idiots who behave irrationally. Family (and even church)
tradition has its place, but when sentimentality causes you to
not only be an idiot but to endanger the lives of others, then
you are, in fact, in bondage—something God never intended for
us.
The storm is coming. Get out.
Christopher J. Priest
2 June 2013
editor@praisenet.org
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