I have been trying to understand the spirituality behind the natural disasters that are taking place around our world lately. Especially since one of them has caught up with me and is affecting my life personally. To be in that space of seeing places and things that you love destroyed, by what you can only imagine is God is a very hard thing to understand. To know that people that you love are hurting and in the disasters in the other parts of the world many lives have been lost really makes you wonder what it’s all about. How could God allow all of this to happen ? Where in all of this can I find a greater higher purpose ? When I wake up tomorrow and my life looks nothing like it did yesterday…where was the good , or better yet where was God ?
While many people are running around talking about how all of this is another reason to believe that the end of the world is fast approaching and it must be a sign that God is angry, all I see is love. I see communities and neighbors that were strangers yesterday reaching out to help one another. I see a society that is very much motivated by money and things, forgetting about all of that in favor not of what can I get, but what can I give. I see men and women out risking their lives to save the homes and lives of others. I see people literally giving the shirt off their back to those in need. Those things ring true from the fire fighters that are risking their lives for us here at home, all the way across the ocean to the engineers that are risking death trying to contain nuclear power plants. All around us in times of need if we are looking, that’s where God is.
I read a passage in the book The Shack , by WM Paul Young today that I want to share with all of you. It reads….”You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through the tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self centeredness, and power, and believing you are on your own and insignificant. All of these contain powerful lies. You see pain and death as ultimate evils and God as the ultimate betrayer, or perhaps, at best, as fundamentally untrustworthy. You dictate the terms and judge God’s actions and find him guilty. The real underlying flaw in your life, is that you don’t think that God is good. If you knew that God was good and that everything-the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives- is all covered by God’s goodness, then while you might not always understand what God is doing, you would trust him.” Tonight let’s trust that although the things going on around us are painful, that God’s goodness exists in all of them.
A few days ago I sent out an invitation to all of my friends to come together in group prayer, from where ever in the world you are. On Monday night over 300 people prayed together for the Arizona communities that are being affected by the wildfires. Tonight as we go to pray together for the second time we have the energy of over 1600 people that will all be praying at the same time. In things like this is where you know that God exists. Sixteen hundred people energetically coming together to pray, where yesterday we had never heard each other’s names. There is beauty in that. In the weeks to come as everyone will be allowed to return home I know that we will see God in many more places as these communities come together to help their neighbors that have seemingly lost everything. It’s in these moments of great loss that we can all come together and realize that we truly are all one, what affects you, affects me. I pray that as time goes by, when we are temped to shake our fists and cry out “why God why” we instead hold out our hands to someone in need and ask instead “how may I serve?”
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