Act of God

In Lady Lake, Florida, one of the areas hit by tornadoes and severe thunderstorms this week, even well-built structures were blown apart. Many of the residences were far less than well-built and mobile homes, "manufactured" homes and wooden houses were reduced to shreds and tatters. People died, small children amongst them.

Many people have joked that tornadoes are attracted to mobile home parks, but it's pretty obvious that churches are at least as often hit by natural disasters. The Lady Lake Church of God, a steel-reinforced structure designed to withstand winds well over 100 mph is now nothing more than wreckage.

Church buses get into more fatal wrecks than city buses and the pious perish with the impious when planes crash. Mud slides and earthquakes and tsunamis and wildfires and plagues kill the innocent and the wicked, godless and God fearing. God works in ways so mysterious that they are indistinguishable from random events.

People like the Church of God's Rev. Larry Lynn who believe that there is an inscrutable plan behind random natural processes that effect the secular, the holy and the profane with equal frequency, never seem to be able to answer why if they cannot know what God will do, they are yet so certain that they know God's nature and can predict what God will do in all sorts of other circumstances. "God will damn you if you do that -- God can't save you unless you do (or believe) this. God responds to prayer." There's a disconnect. Places where people pray, blow up and burn down. People who pray get blown up, burned up and destroyed by "acts of God" with a frequency that often seems to exceed statistical probability.

Now people like Fallwell or Haggard or Robertson or any of the other phony faith vendors will tell you they can see a plan behind it - someone ( other than Haggard) must have been allowed to be gay or Jewish or Atheist and so several towns with their children and their elderly and their prayerful and their reprobates had to die, but there's no correlation there either, of course. In fact it's the pious Bible Belt that seems to suffer at least as much as if not more than the sinful cities.

So God seems to act at random even though those who presume to speak for him claim to know all his foibles and infatuations. There is a disconnect. If you can't know what God will do by looking at what he does, how can you claim to know what he will do at all? And of course hundreds of Floridians are standing in the wreckage on a drizzly morning thanking God that it was somebody else and not them lying under a beam with a broken neck. You wouldn't want God to think you weren't grateful at his random acts of violence. And then there are the paramedics, the electricians, the radio operators, the police, the doctors, the heavy equipment operators -- they are out there trying to undo what God hath wrought. Whence cometh our help? Are they part of God's plan if they're trying to remedy his acts of destruction?

Could it be possible that God is so unknowable that it's a waste of time to include him and his plans in our concept of reality? Could it be possible that we have a pretty good idea that mercy, justice and compassion aren't going to come out of a whirlwind and will not exist at all without us and our efforts?

"Thank God we're OK. That's the main thing." said one resident. Yes, thank God it was some adorable 7 year old and not me. God is good.

"We're going to celebrate, praise the Lord and reaffirm our faith" said Reverend Lynn "There is nothing we can change." Perhaps it's a harmless anodyne to insist that there is a pattern in chaos, a just, merciful and loving reason to squash a terrified child, but we are the only ones who can change anything; heal the injured, house the homeless, feed the hungry. Only we can inject justice, compassion and mercy into a 14 billion year old and near eternal process of chaos contained only by natural law. My faith in man may be shaky at best, but it's worth affirming and re-affirming and if I'm going to praise anybody, let it be those who help and give of themselves.