At the end of August, the world watched in horror as entire villages were swept away in severe flooding and mudslides in Nepal. As of today, more than 1,350 people have been declared dead, and thousands are still missing. The devastation is undeniable, as is the heartbreaking truth that these events occur around the globe every year, including in the United States.
I live in Nashville, which has been hit with some severe tornadoes in the decade I’ve called Music City home. A few years ago, one ravaged the neighborhood surrounding the church where my husband is a pastor.
When we drove around the area afterward, all I could do was offer a breathless prayer: “Lord, have mercy!” In spite of the suffering wrought, these situations also present an opportunity for the Church to serve its neighbors and proclaim the eternal hope we have in Jesus Christ.
We call these events “natural disasters,” but the reality is that these tragedies are anything but “natural.” When God created the heavens and the earth, He proclaimed all of it good (Genesis 1:31).
Nevertheless, after mankind’s fall into sin, all of creation became corrupted, as the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:22, NKJV: “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” Every natural disaster reminds us that we live in a fallen world — that mankind’s sin irreparably marred the world’s original perfection.
In our humanness, we want to understand why we suffer, and we often want to blame someone or something. This inclination might lead us to see correlations and want to establish causation — for instance, thinking that a nation or group of people is being punished by means of the natural disaster.