Pondering Katrina, Part 2
I recommend this essay (Where is God when disaster strikes?) from the Assist News Service, it makes the point I was trying to make, that God is not to blame for a disaster, but rather, God is revealed in us as we minister to those who are victims of disaster.

Pondering Katrina
As many of you know I maintain another blog devoted to Bible prophecy and current events and people have asked me if I think that Hurricane Katrina has prophetic significance. My answer is yes...and no. Let me explain. People are quick to jump to conlcusions and to place blame. We assume that important events are also important from a larger perpspective, it's a big storm, so God must have sent it for a reason. This is a conclusion that helps us make sense of dramatic events and it is a natural human reaction, and although my personal theology holds that God can control things like the weather (God's express will), I don't believe that God micromanages the weather (God's permissive will). I don't beleive that God sent the storm or had any particlular anger towards the good people of New Orleans. Nor do I believe that our part as Christians is to cast blame, but rather to help out and ease the suffering of our fellow human beings as best we can. Sometimes a storm is just a storm. That said, this storm is one of several events that represent a larger trend that does have prophetic significance. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus stated:

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring ... (Luke 21:25)

This is part of a time the Bible calls the "end of the age" and not (as some would tell you) the end of the world. Whether you believe that or not, major disasters are a reminder to us, a wake-up call, that life is very fragile and we should take this time to affirm our relationship to God and to each other...before the next storm hits.

I think this poem is particularly moving, so on this day of celebrating the resurrection of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, here are some timely words:

Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse,
the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart that--pierced--died,
withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable,
a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back,
not papier-maché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta,
vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light,
robed in real linen,
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

YOU'RE GOOD ENOUGH!
The next time you feel like GOD can't use you, just remember...

Noah was a drunk
Abraham was too old
Isaac was a daydreamer
Jacob was a liar
Leah was ugly
Joseph was abused
Moses had a stuttering problem
Gideon was afraid
Sampson had long hair and was a womanizer
Rahab was a prostitute
Jeremiah and Timothy were too young
David had an affair and was a murderer
Elijah was suicidal
Isaiah preached naked
Jonah ran from God
Naomi was a widow
Job went bankrupt
John the Baptist ate bugs
Peter denied Christ
The Disciples fell asleep while praying
Martha worried about everything
The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once
Zaccheus was too small
Paul was too religious
Timothy had an ulcer...
AND
Lazarus was dead!
What do you have that's worse than that?
So no more excuses!
God can use you to your full potential.
Besides you aren't the message,
you are just the messenger.

- BenJammin