It’s the time factor, as in, “How long, Lord?”
Well, that, and life is often blindsided by random viciousness and calamity, where one moment it unfolds in a nondescript way, and in the next moment it’s snuffed out by a thunderous, staggeringly massive, angry and other-worldly wall of water and mud and debris.
I’ve watched a few videos of the beyond-Biblical, epochal avalanche and flooding in Nepal, and I’m once again reminded that people will start asking where God was, or why such a thing could possibly happen to innocent people just going about their day.
And there will be nothing but crickets in response, or at best paltry efforts at letting God off the hook, or the old classic: “That’s life in a fallen world.”
What I’m becoming more convinced of is a more logical truth: life on earth is a crapshoot, and humans have a tendency toward believing that bad things can’t happen to them—even when they decide to populate topography like steep-walled canyons with a river running through it in proximity to the Himalayas and glaciers and avalanche threats.
Earth has no reverence for us. Earth is Earth, with its currents and ecosystems and forces that operate despite our attempts to harness or limit or abuse. Earth is dynamic. It may be wounded, but it will seek and find some level of homeostasis, with or without us.
As much as it troubles me to write these words, I’m becoming increasingly of the mind that God has nothing to do with this disaster, or us. And “How long, Lord?” is a mere scream into the void.
😦
3 Cents' 