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Sandy, Sovereignty and Where God Is During Disasters

An ancient graffito on the Palatine shows a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, bearing the inscription “Alexamenos worships his god.” While meant to disparage and even mock, the image rings true. We worship, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann observed, the crucified God. 

Jesus on the cross was God entering into the reality of human suffering, experiencing it just like we do, in order to demonstrate that even when we used our free will to reject him, his love never ended. But this was not suffering for its own sake but suffering so we might use our free will and choose again.

And that this time, the choice would be the right one. 

Frederick Buechner put it this way: “Like a father saying about his sick child, ‘I’d do anything to make you well,’ God finally calls his own bluff and does it.” The ultimate deliverance, the most significant healing, the most strategic rescue, has come. My greatest and most terrible affliction has been addressed. God has given me the greatest answer to my questions. 

He has given me Himself.

So the real question is whether I will allow the reality of pain and suffering of this world to drive me away from God, or to God, where he can wrap his arms around me and walk with me through its darkest night toward the promise of a brighter tomorrow. 

For His will be the final word, and it will be not only good, but best.

I am reminded how the song “40,” based on the 40th Psalm, often marked the end of U2 concerts following the events of Sept. 11, 2001.  As the band toured around the world in support of their CD All That You Can’t Leave Behind, tens of thousands of people nightly could be heard singing the refrain, “How long (to sing this song).”

Bono, lead singer of the group, reflected: “How long … hunger? How long … hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded? I thought it odd that the vocalizing of such questions could bring such comfort: to me too.” 

But this is precisely what does bring comfort’hope that lives within the now and the not yet. Bold living in light of our falleness, and a frank embrace of the realities of a fallen world, is the mark of faith. It embraces the emotional anguish but never lets the emotions grow beyond the shadow of the character of God’or the knowledge of the story at hand. 

The truth is that God loves passionately and lives with the pain of that love more than we could ever imagine. 

And that is the greater story—the one in which I must place my own.