Prayers Before Tsunami Water Sells on Ebay

Before the first vial of tsunami water sells on Ebay for $12.99, I feel compelled to discuss humanity. The images of the Indonesian tsunami’s devastation are unprecedented. A quarter of a million people could be lost when it is all said and done. A quarter of a million people! That is as cataclysmic of a world event that I can bear in my lifetime. I am not a doomsayer but the tsunami has raised questions in me that tear at the fabric of my being. Why is it that the most abominable natural disaster in the history of the world in terms of human lives lost hasn’t garnered the media attention it deserves? I do not know.

Did the earthquake and tsunami strike at an inconvenient time when Christians were unfurling white doilies on the dinner table at Christmas or the world prepared to indulge in a blitzkrieg of alcohol on New Years Eve? I do not know.

As a nation, America stands proudly at the forefront of relief efforts underway but how come many of its citizens, in part, act so insulated from the devastation? Is the insulation a result of the distance between us and the effected Indonesian countries? Can it be explained in terms of miles? More media attention was devoted to the terrorist attacks of September 11th yet the loss of life pales in comparison to the number of people just drowned in the Indian ocean. Aftershocks must be waning because the story is barely front page news a week later.

Maybe the tsunami cannot pang deeper into our consciousness because this wasn’t man’s doing. The tsunami can be explained in terms of an accident as the result of mother’s nature fury. There seems to be an inherent emotional discount if Mother Nature is the perpetrator but a bottomless culpability if man creates his own malevolence. Compare the human loss in the holocaust verses The Black Plague. The first image to blame for the holocaust is dictator Adolf Hitler. Try that little brain teaser with The Black Plaque. The poster child for The Black Plague is…non-descript and anonymous. Rightly or wrongly, evil can be embodied in a way that mother nature can’t find sponsors.

This explains why we were inundated with round the clock media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial and the Scott Perterson trial? Why did people get so emotionally invested in the horrific story of the desperate lady who eviscerated an unsuspecting pregnant woman for her unborn baby then showed off the stolen infant to her pastor? I believe it was because goodwill to others got lost on the road to Wicked. One life is as precious as the next but we may be talking about a quarter of a million people wiped off the planet. Evil seizes headlines while Mother Nature’s fury seems to digest on less antacid. If OJ Simpson’s vehicle never ran out of getaway gas, CNN cameras might still be following the white van on a live feed.

If you allow your soul to grieve for the tsunami toll – the lives lost and shattered, the orphaned children, the millions of homes leveled, waterborne disease, resulting famine, etc. what do you truly feel? I feel an all encompassing empathy and compassion God put inside me. If God bears the parenthood to his children’s feelings, is it a safe tenet to conclude God also weeps when we willfully do harm to one another single handedly or in world wars? Moreover, does God weep when his Mother Nature runs amuck?

Creationists believe God created both human beings and the heavens and the earth. Did God just set the earth and its parts spinning into motion? Like sand in an hourglass, are we left to our own devices and Mother Nature’s mercy? I do not know. Doomsayers, evil doers, and warmongers, take timeout out of our busy lives and pray for humanity. Let us pray.