It has been a pretty eventful summer. The Olympics has been filled with compelling stories, and athletic heroes achieving gold. Social media has been a buzz of political rants and Pokemon sightings.
However, in the midst of getting ready to go back school and putting the finishing touches on your fantasy football team has been two national tragedies affecting thousands but missing the attention of the masses.
Record rainfall and flooding slamming Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas in Louisiana leaving them battered and bruised. Reports of 21.86 of rain fell topping the threshold of 20.7 inches for a 1,000- year rainfall event for that period. In other words, a “1000 year rain event” in two days. That is heck of a lot of rain. Killing 7 people and displacing tens of thousands of people.
It is as bad if not as worse as Hurricane Katrina eleven years ago, and this event is flying under the social radar, but not the doppler radar.
Vance Joy might have been prophetic with his hit song the “Fire and Flood,” because on the other side of the country in California devastating fires have ravaged the San Bernardino area. Burning 25,000 aches and forcing 82,000 people to evacuate and be displaced from their homes. That is A LOT of people; 82,000 people is more than most NFL Football stadiums.
Even though these events are awful they need our attention.
In moments like these people often dismiss them or try to explain it away with over spiritual nonsense, like Pastor Tony Perkins, who believes natural disasters happen to “punish gay people.”
Jesus says that the “rain falls on both the just and unjust" (Matthew 5.45). Job is mentioned in the Old Testament as holy, but natural disasters took his home, his family, and his livelihood.
But just as God brought Job out of his troubles, so He will bring us out as we too will go through the fire and the rain.
I remember when I was studying at the University of Valley Forge and received the frightening phone call from my father that our home in Philly was hit by a freak flood from a neighboring creek that overflowed.
My first thought was, “These things happen to other people not me.”
The sights and images of my flood ravaged neighborhood are burned on my retinas. As I drove down the street to my home, I was overwhelmed thinking that my block looks like a third world country. Debris and destruction at every turn of the head. It moved me to tears to think something like this could happen to my family.
However, there was hope in the devastation, and the hope was people.
In the mist of all the destruction was neighbor helping neighbor.
It was a beautiful thing to behold, old and young, male and female, black and white helping and caring for each other.
Even though bad things happen to good people it takes good people to get through bad things.
It reminds me of the words from one of my childhood heroes Mr. Rogers, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
When tragedy strikes, may we not just ask who can be a neighbor, but may we rise up and be a neighbor.
