Sunday, January 02, 2005
TooNomos Tsunami
BBC is now reporting 145,000 have died as a result of the Tsunami floods.
The loss of life is horrible, tragic, unbelievable, gut-wrenching, deplorable grief and sadness. The tragedy of 9/11/2001 is comparitively small. The 2996 victims of the 9/11 terrorist tragedy are listed here.
But the tsunami tragedy of 2004 is of a different scope. The number of tsunami victims is hard to comprehend. One man lost 72 of his family members. Can you imagine losing your parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, grandparents, all at one time? Most of us suffer horrible pain and grief -- attending one funeral at a time, spaced over several decades, so it is hard to imagine losing all those family members at one time...
...and the closer it hits to home, the more real it is. We typically harden ourselves to far off news, and sometimes we try to harden ourselves to news that hits closer to home. My neighbor Paul -- across the street -- just lost his wife -- 2 days after Christmas. She was only 39 years old, the mother of 4 small children. She died of some form of meningitis -- very suddenly -- in less than 24 hours.
What a week of sorrow, sadness -- and mercy. In judgement, God always remembers mercy. See for instance this testimony of God's mercy, reflecting on tsunamis, 9/11, Habbakkuk 3 and Romans 8. Or consider what this modern day Isaac Newton is saying about tsunamis and mercy.
The loss of life is horrible, tragic, unbelievable, gut-wrenching, deplorable grief and sadness. The tragedy of 9/11/2001 is comparitively small. The 2996 victims of the 9/11 terrorist tragedy are listed here.
But the tsunami tragedy of 2004 is of a different scope. The number of tsunami victims is hard to comprehend. One man lost 72 of his family members. Can you imagine losing your parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, grandparents, all at one time? Most of us suffer horrible pain and grief -- attending one funeral at a time, spaced over several decades, so it is hard to imagine losing all those family members at one time...
...and the closer it hits to home, the more real it is. We typically harden ourselves to far off news, and sometimes we try to harden ourselves to news that hits closer to home. My neighbor Paul -- across the street -- just lost his wife -- 2 days after Christmas. She was only 39 years old, the mother of 4 small children. She died of some form of meningitis -- very suddenly -- in less than 24 hours.
What a week of sorrow, sadness -- and mercy. In judgement, God always remembers mercy. See for instance this testimony of God's mercy, reflecting on tsunamis, 9/11, Habbakkuk 3 and Romans 8. Or consider what this modern day Isaac Newton is saying about tsunamis and mercy.
