Friday, December 31, 2004

Tsunami

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

The last figures I heard were somewhere around 121,000. It could of been more, but that was the last figures I remember hearing. I feel oddly detached to the whole tsunami thing in far east. 121,000 people are gone in an instant. Poof. When I first heard about it and saw some of the footage I immediately thought Hollywood already did that movie last year. I know that sounds horrible.

All I know is this one of the dead was an interpretor that a pastor friend of ours used when he taught at the Lutheran Seminary in Sri Lanka. This man had just finished translating the The Book of Concord into Sri Lankan language. This man and his wife were killed on the train that was washed away by the tsunami. That is just one of thousands. That's enough for me. I don't need to know any more.

The poem I quoted above has gotten me in trouble before. I quoted it one time and someone got all upset with me (this was in another place and another time) and decided I was an "evolutionist" (I'm not. For the record I believe wholeheartedly in the Creation as found in Genesis 1). I think the poem above just illistrates my feeling of me in the world. I am a very small portion a "cog" if you will. When something like a tsunami or earthquake or big rain storm happens I often think of that poem. Nature makes me feel so small, so inconsequential. Tiny.

I don't have much more to say about it. The tsunami is more like a feeling to me, I can't put my hat on it, its almost a theory. I don't know. I just don't know.

2 comments:

rebekah said...

ah now see that's a good verse to quote. it fits somehow...

Anonymous said...

Were it not for a personal God, the verse above would be entirely true.
But without God, there is no "why"; there is just more nothing.
Stay in the struggle, brother.
David