Feeble Knees

Thursday, September 01, 2005

If I Was God...

Yesterday morning I turned on the radio for the latest news and heard two things that made me want to dig a hole and jump in it. I heard that emergency personnel and police in New Orleans are being shot at and mugged by looters. Then I heard that close to one thousand people were killed in a stampede in Baghdad, many of them women and children.

Today the world is very lucky that God is God, and I am not.

It is times like this I wonder how God can restrain Himself from just smiting the whole sorry lot of us. There are some who blame God for these natural disasters like the Tsunami and now Hurricane Katrina. But really I find it more incredible that He doesn't smite us every time we as a species rightly deserve it. How can He look upon those looting and terrorizing flood victims in the south and not let a few well-aimed lightning bolts fly?

You can bet if I was the supreme omnipotent deity, the flashes would be flying. I would not exercise the same restraint, I would not have mercy.

This is why God in His infinite wisdom saw to it that I not have that kind of power.

Perhaps it is a misnomer to refer to it as "Man's inhumanity to man". In my gut I am shamed to admit that there is frequently nothing at all humane about human nature. People who are looting and stampeding are just showing their all too natural and flawed human nature.

It takes something Other to rise above primal self-preservationist instincts in times of crisis. Thank God that there are people rising above, doing heroic selfless work to seek and save lives. Pray to God that they are strengthened, renewed, protected and preserved as they give so completely of themselves that others might live.

And while you're at it, pray that the spirit of God convicts the looters, the tramplers, the cowards and brutes in their hearts, that shame would burn their souls. Pray that they are brought to their knees under the weight of their crimes, that they may yet have the opportunity to repent of all their evil and turn themselves in or commit themselves to help and not hurt...
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