2005-09-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere is ringing today with thoughts about God’s role vs. humanity’s role in Katrina. My thoughts rest with my husband’s and my friend Lex’s: I don’t know specifically why God allows or maybe even causes disasters. And I’m okay with that.

For one thing, I know God is the creator and master of the universe. No act of nature, no act of evil is greater than God Himself. Nothing happens that escapes God's sovereignty. By His word the wind and sea rise and calm. I also know that nature is a revelation of God’s glory. I, like Chris, believe that God’s glory is not relegated to the things we call “blessings,” because God is both the God of Compassion and the God of Wrath. God’s glory is both beautiful and ferocious. It brings both awe and trembling. And I know that my wisdom will never surpass God’s—on the earth, I will never recognize all true blessings and I will never comprehend the true depths of “theology.” Of course, those kinds of sentiments probably won’t bring anyone to Christ in this disaster. But I do believe nature can lead men to repentance. I do believe seeing the darkness (literal or spiritual) can lead men to repentance.

Along the same line, I also know that God’s judgment and the darkness He allows come with the offer of redemption, and often God uses those negatives as the actual means to redemption. I think that's Biblical. I've seen it in my own life. And I want to believe that pattern will continue until the final judgment, when redemption will only be for those who have already had faith. I'm not in any way suggesting Katrina is an act of judgment from God; I'm just divulging on the aspects of God's character. And I believe it's possible that God’s mercy is sometimes wrapped up in His wrath. (Consider Flannery O’Connor’s moments of violent grace.)

To accept the God who offers mercy, grace, and love without recognizing the God of Wrath diminishes my understanding of the mercy, grace, and love God gives me. The same is true of forgiveness. I can never understand the magnitude of God’s forgiveness until I understand the magnitude of my sin. I am grateful for every time God has allowed me to be far from Him, for every time He has broken me to bring me back, because otherwise I wouldn’t have the relationship with Him that I have now.

God is both the God of forgiveness and the God of Justice, and He’s the God who knows how our hearts work—He knows that one man comes to Him in anger and another finds Him in agony and another finds Him through curiosity, while yet another finds Him in peace. All ways are acts of God’s kindness—He leads me, who does not deserve salvation, to salvation. When I understand that, I realize no matter the circumstances, I was shown kindness and compassion. And in all ways God’s glory shines brightly.

I don’t need an explanation for what God does or allows on earth, because I have an understanding of who God is and what He’s done for me through Jesus. My prayer is that those suffering would not only have their physical needs met, but would have their needs for explanations met by gaining an understanding—not of what God does, but of who God is, who Jesus is: the great Redeemer from all pain and all suffering.

2005-09-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

I grew up (for a little while) in the South—Prattville, Alabama to be exact. As a kid, each of our vacations was spent visiting family in Texas, via automobile. My dad was a pilot, which means he got his fill of air travel during his regular 9 to 5. That’s right. . . . My parents had the guts to load up two kids for a cross-country drive, complete with duffle bags brimming with what we deemed necessities, a full-sized tape player (before the dawn of Walk-man), and two pairs of metal headphones with a “splitter.” To top it off, I had asthma, as well as nearly every allergy known to man, and one time the corner of that tape player ended up wedged in my eyebrow. Nonetheless, we drove to Texas from Alabama twice a year.

On those drives from Prattville to San Antonio, we made two routine stops: a seafood restaurant housed in a boat on the Mississippi, where I learned to eat catfish and corndogs, and a picnic table at a park in Louisiana with the largest fly I’ve ever seen. Tonight, there’s a good chance both of those stops have been washed away.

When we weren't rambling across the country, my mom drove my sister and I down Montgomery's rolling streets lined with shacks and impoverished families. At home in the playroom of our two-story, suburbia, custom-built house, I pretended to be the African American women we saw on the way to school, babies in both arms, toddlers and dogs roaming the yard. When we moved to Oklahoma, I gathered my friends in the backyard, taught them how to pretend to be poor. We made food from crabapples and mint leaves, furnished imaginary huts with trash left along imaginary river banks. The truth was I didn’t have any idea what being poor meant.

I’ve told those stories in a different tone a million times, and they’ve brought some pretty good laughs. But now, watching real people living the same "fantasies" I’d conjured up in my yard, these stories seem trivial, almost heartless, even though I was just a kid who really did dream of living in poverty one day. The strangest thing is that those people on TV and those memories aren’t the only things that feel desecrated by the storm. Those things are safe in a false way, somewhat still intact in my mind. But strangely, the South in the novels I love somehow feels violated, as though the mystery caught up in Southern literature has somehow been dismantled. And that’s a pathetic thing to feel in the midst of a tragedy that’s ripped apart real people with real lives, because the South in novels isn’t anyone’s but mine. (The same as it isn’t anyone’s but yours, if you read that sort of thing.) It's not that I'm not sad for the real people, because I am, much more than I am for anything else. But I'm also sad for something intangible. In a time that should be evoking my most sincere prayers, all my sadness isn't dedicated to those in need. Part of it is for something that isn’t even real and doesn’t involve any real people other than myself.

Realizations like that make me wish I knew more about love. I mean the kind of love that doesn’t have to turn inward to find compassion. The kind of love that doesn't have to be shared between actual people and things that are only alive in emotions . . . the kind that doesn’t have to make something “real to me” whether through a book or an acquaintance or a news reel . . . the kind that doesn’t have to imagine “what if that happened to me” in order to really be heartbroken for a stranger.

I've been foolish enough to believe I’ve felt that in the past. But I've never been selflessly compassionate the way Jesus is. Besides divinity, maybe the difference between us is that Jesus doesn’t need to imagine—He already sees. His compassion is never towards strangers—he knows us all. Maybe that’s an okay, even important, difference on many levels. But in my quest to be Christlike, it’s also a truth that reminds me how far from the mind of Christ I really am.

Lunch Hour: Recollections of an Editor