A source of hope (9/9/05)

The entire city of New Orleans, once 480,000 strong, is now being ordered to evacuate. Tens of thousands are homeless, totally without possessions. Bands of armed men and looters are quickly becoming the city’s only occupants. To put it into perspective, if one can, the death toll of Katrina’s victims is rising so fast along the Gulf Coast that it may soon equal or exceed the entire population of Portland. The scenes of devastation, the catatonic stares of survivors, the heart-wrenching stories; all have people around the world asking, why?

I too have often wondered at such imponderables. We all have; the magnitude of the horror begs the question. And in the months to come there will be those who would wield this catastrophe as a weapon against God. “There is no God,” they will say, “or if He does exist, He is either powerless to protect us, or too apathetic to the human plight to care.” Tough accusations that will not easily succumb to glib or canned responses. Nor should they.

Truth is, I’m not at all sure that anyone has or has ever had a satisfactory explanation for this brand of grief. Still, I cannot help but marvel at the knee-jerk reaction humanity seems to have at tragedy too big to be ignored, versus the silence with which people endure less conspicuous trials. Is one person’s terminal illness less real or valid than multitudes dying by an act of nature? Forty four million abortions have occurred in this country over the last 32 years; over 1.3 million will be sacrificed, largely to the god of convenience, this year alone. Yet where is the cry for those most innocent of victims? What of the outrage of death itself? Whether we’re comfortable with the thought or not, all of Katrina’s victims, men, women and children, would have died in due course, as will all of us, yet none but God has expressed sorrow that such a thing as death should even exist.

Answers? I wish I had them. And what I do have, some would say is all too simplistic. Just faith.

I believe because the price of unbelief is no less than the forfeiture of the only hope, the only comfort mankind has. I believe because tragedy, whether on a great or small scale, must have some meaning.

So I choose to find meaning for both life and death in that most tragic of all events — the substitutionary sacrifice of my sinless Savior upon the cross. In His death I have found my life; in His resurrection, I have found my hope. And at the end of the day, that is all that I possess, all that I am, and all that I need.

So I believe.

Paul Strouse, senior minister,

West Walnut Church of Christ,

Portland[[In-content Ad]]