It seems that the entire planet seems to have endured more natural disasters as of late—everything from hurricanes in the U.S., to earthquakes in Japan, to tsunamis in the South Pacific. But perhaps it is the geography of the latest headline-making crisis that has me thinking especially of the victims involved. Over the past few days, wildfires have torn through many highly populated areas in Texas. So close to home is this tragedy, that many of the affected areas have touched the lives of close friends of mine. So it seems natural that the infernos have me thinking more deeply of how such calamity pertains to God, and how we are to relate to Him.
The natural question at a time of tragedy is always, “Where is God?” These may not be the exact words a person speaks—perhaps it’s, “If God is loving, how could He let this happen?” or, “Why would God let His people suffer?”—but at the core, this is the question everyone is asking. “Where is God?”
Many of us have spent time praying for rain during these record-setting dry months. Even more of us have petitioned God in these past few weeks as our state has caught fire. We pray that God would change our circumstances. This is certainly a biblical practice, but then, God could have simply stopped the fires before they ever started in the first place, right? So the next question is, “If God could stop a fire before it starts, why would He allow it to burn homes and even take lives?” This is where it gets tricky.
As I ask this question, I think of what the pain the fires cause means in the first place. What I see is that God is using the fires for His good. In allowing these devastating fires to burn our homes, God is calling us to Himself. As we go to Him in prayer, something happens. You see, prayer isn’t simply our way of asking God for things—it’s our fellowship with Him. We need it. Our spirits cannot live without it. Like rain to a parched earth, God’s presence saturates our souls. When God stops the rain, He paints a picture with the soil of what our souls look like when we don’t have Him.
Honestly, I believe with all my heart that when God allows tragedy to befall us, it hurts Him every bit as much as or more than it hurts us. He does love us. But what is the greater love—to give us complete comfort apart from Him, or to wound us when we stray away from the one place we can have life? It sounds crazy, but if Jesus is life, and our only source of life, then to bring us back to Him would be entirely life-giving, and completely loving.
My encouragement to you is not that you would stop praying for God to stop these fires. In fact, I encourage you to pray all the more. But as you do, don’t simply ask God to stop our pain. Ask Him to come pouring into You that your heart would be saturated with His perfect love. “Father, please bring rain to our land to stop these devastating wildfires. And God, please come into my heart and soak me in your love and grace. Because like the soil of the earth, my heart thirsts desperately for the relief that only You can offer. Rain down on me.”
I once heard that the reason a shepherd carries staff or crook is so that when a sheep repeatedly strayed away from the flock, he could use his staff to break its leg to keep it from wandering off into danger again. It’s why they often carried a lamb around their shoulders, and why we often see Jesus depicted as doing just that. So in the 23rd Psalm, when the Psalmist says, “You make me lie down in green pastures,” the imagery was such that God literally takes away our ability to walk so that we won’t stray away from Him. Because sometimes God has to cut our legs out from under us to show us how bad we need a Crutch.
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