Sacred

Our dinner table in Fayetteville, Ark. was a sombre place on the evening of December 26, 2004. My father sat down and told us a wall of water had crushed the east coast of our home country, Sri Lanka, as well as parts of Indonesia and Thailand. He said there would probably be close to 200 dead.

As time passed, our family along with the rest of the world began to realize the devastating effects of what is now known as the Asian Tsunami. Over 225,000 people died in 11 countries while thousands were permanently displaced.

Perhaps the most shocking part about the thousands dead is that it is only a microcosm of the daily tragedy that confronts the world. People die every day from preventable and treatable diseases, starvation and malnutrition and wars around the globe. Natural disasters may not be a daily occurrence, but all of us can remember a deadly earthquake, hurricane or volcanic eruption.

The world’s response to these events is typical: Flags flown at half mast, millions of dollars in donations and fighting about which country donates more. Regardless of our beliefs, we react strongly and feel deeply for those affected by disastrous events because we respond in part to what the event uncovers in ourselves.

It reveals the tragedy of our humanity.

One of the stories that got the most coverage from Sri Lanka was the derailment of a train heading south. I remember watching Christiane Amanpour’s piece on CNN about the Queen of the Sea and its almost 1,000 dead passengers. The twisted metal of the rails mixing with the destroyed passenger carriages and bent trees, desperate villagers clambering all over it to salvage what little they could.

It’s a snapshot of our life on earth. We are groping, fumbling and yearning for what was, trying to put the pieces of our lives together, attempting to create peace in a chaotic reality. Our train was destroyed in the Garden of Eden, and as we separated from God, it derailed our lives. We are left with the twisted metal as we ransack the world for the remnants of the people we were and the people we were created to be. The Asian Tsunami was a natural tragedy because of the sin that entered the world. And our lives are the human tragedy, a result of that same sin.

It would be easy to think that the problems natural disasters cause can be fixed by donations, relief workers, food and medicine. Those are human solutions that can have positive outcomes. But God altered the tragedy that beset the world by sending his son to the cross so that in the middle of our futile attempts to make sense of the tragedy of our humanity, we can look to Jesus and have hope.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under All Articles, Sacred. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.