Earthquakes, Tornadoes and a guy named Noah

Disclaimer: Since I wrote this blog we now know that the earthquake in China is more severe than previously estimated. The deathtoll has risen from 12,000 to 15,000 and the missing persons has risen to 40,000. Make sure that China finds favor in your prayers tonight. God help us all.

End of disclaimer:

I remember when I was a little kid dressed up in my Sunday’s best huddled together with other little kids sitting in the basement of a church for Sunday school… I remember the stories that they’d tell me about Samson and the asses jaw bone, or David versus the invincible giant named Goliath, or the inconquerable Elijah versus the 800 prophets of Baal. I remember how the sunday school teacher would get to the part about the devil and as if on cue the shadows would come to life in that dimly lit mildewed church basement. 

I can’t count how many times I swallowed my heart in fear when the Philistine army circled Samson or jumped for joy when one of David’s smooth stones navigated its way to the soft spot of Goliath’s big head. No stories are tailor made to fit a child’s imagination better than the ones from the bible and that includes you Mr. Harry Potter. The world is a very different place when you are a child and virtue isn’t just an abstract term it is a living entity.

But as I got older and started to reconcile reason with faith and I heard these stories told over and over I learned very quickly that good would triumph over evil, that light would conquer darkness and none but the righteous shall see God. That took all the nail biting experience out of the stories for me. All I had to do was identify who was on God’s side in the story and then the outcome was a foregone conclusion. And that formula held true for about ninety nine percent of the stories I read.

But there was still one story that wouldn’t tie into that neat little bow. There was one story that deviated from the normal process of good versus evil. It was more nuanced in nature and the stakes were a lot higher than just a giant, 800 hundred prophets, or an entire army. What was at stake was every life on earth.

It’s going to rain,

That’s what God told Noah. Then he gave him the designs to the first yacht ever built. The designs were so intricate that it could accommodate one couple of every living species on earth. God then told Noah that as soon as he was done to get himself and his family on board because the earth was about to evict every living inhabitant it had. 

Now here is what is unnerving about this story, according to the bible it had never rained before. So how was anybody supposed to know what that meant or the ramifications of it raining? And where were the bad guys in this story? The bible just talks of people doing things that were distasteful to God. Which I assume means they were morally inept…And if everybody in the story was doing bad things except for Noah, does that make him the good guy or the oddball? And if Noah is the good guy then what is God, the just and righteous Arbitrator?…So what would that make the rain?…An instrument of God’s will…(Am I the only one terrified by this story?)

When you look at what is going on with the world today. Brush fires are consuming the forests in Florida. Just a couple of weeks ago they were ablaze in California. Over 900 tornadoes have touched down in the United States already. Nine hundred!! There were earthquakes in Illinois and Missouri for God sakes. When is the last time you heard of an earthquake in the midwest. Cyclones wiped out over 100,000 people in Burma, while the death toll in China’s devasting earth quake nears 12,000 with over 18,000 people still missing…

Like the Noah story, this is too complex for me to give an indefinite answer. I suppose if pressed I could say global warming. The brush fires probably caused by some hand of mischief.  But when so many events are taking place at such an alarming rate I have to wonder if there is an oddball amongst us with blue prints to build the next animal luxury liner?