earthquake in haiti
posted on 
January 13
January 13 Living is hard sometimes.
It is unpredictable and disappointing. It is unfair, unjust and unyielding at times.
Why am I here, warm, comfortable and content and she is there... in pain, confused, hopeless.
Why was I dealt a lucky hand and she was not? Are our lives just subjected to random happenings? Or is there an orchestrater? I happen to believe in the latter, but today I am troubled by that belief...
Reader Comments (4)
Agreed!
2 Peter 3:9 (King James Version)
9The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Don't be troubled, the Lord doesn't want anyone to perish, He wasn't behind all this. Why would He kill people He already came to save? We live in a fallen world, plus there is an enemy that is behind it making bad things happen.
I struggled a LOT with that idea this summer when I went to Haiti. I was in a hospice for terminally ill children who had arms as thin as my fingers and were basically just being pumped with morphine to lessen their pain until they died. There was a absolutely beautiful 13 year old girl lying in a crib sweaty with fever. I was haunted with the question... "why is she here and why am I from America" I was right next to her but we were in different worlds. The darkness in Haiti is overwhelming. We heard voodoo drums from our hotel every night. People's eyes are empty. It was one of the hardest experiences of my life.
I am reading (for the second time) Donald Miller's new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Because of it, I have started thinking of our "orchestrator" as a "master storyteller" who allows the bad stuff to happen partly because it makes the good stuff that much sweeter. Here is a passage from A Million Miles that calms me (although it would, admittedly, make more sense within the context of the entire book).
"I was watching the news the other night, and they were still covering that story in Mumbai about the terrorists who went on a shooting rampage. The man on the news said that before the terrorists killed the Jews in the Jewish center, they tortured them. I had to turn off the television, because I could see the torture in my head the way they were describing it. I kept imagining these people, just living their daily lives, and then having them suddenly ended in unjust tragedy. When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller."