By Karen Y. Stevens

 

As I’m writing this, I’m watching the weather channel on the updates of Hurricane Florence.

My heart goes out to those people, knowing what they are experiencing.

That being said, hurricanes are intriguing; the power they have.  Especially since hurricanes are formed by just having warm water.  Hurricanes begin near the equator.  As the moisture evaporates, it rises until enormous amounts of heated, moist air are twisted high in the atmosphere.  That’s it; nothing more.

It’s so strange to me that much force can come from warm water.  It’s also distressing that natural disasters are often called “acts of God” while no credit is given to God for the earth itself.

God set things in motion at the beginning of time, when he locked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.  God said man would toil the land, and it would be hard and cursed.

Genesis 3:17 states “To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.”

We cannot blame God, for something that man is to blame for many years ago.  But having said that, it doesn’t mean that God has a hands-off policy when it comes to natural disasters.  Many people want to protect God from the clear teaching of the Bible, which shows He is involved in natural disasters.

It is not that God causes them, but the very fact that He could prevent them shows that we need to face squarely that natural disasters happen within God’s providence.  The flood during Noah’s days was sent by God, and clearly, God sent the plagues in Egypt.  It says regarding Jonah that God hurled a storm into the sea.  So, we must acknowledge God in natural disasters.

The question is why He allows them, and what is there to be learned.

Just as God showed Pharaoh His power thru the plagues, natural disasters show us the uncertainty of life, which should turn us toward God.  One of the greatest challenges we have as Christians is to continue somehow to believe God, and to trust Him in the midst of horrendous devastation.

When you see children being separated from their parents, when you see lives being torn, and hundreds of people dead, it is very natural to ask, “Where is God?”

Martin Luther King said, “When you look around and wonder whether God cares, you must always hurry to the cross, and you must see Him there.”

Remember, Job’s 10 children died in a natural wind disaster, and God loved Job very much.  His wife said to curse God and die, but Job said “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Show the world that you can praise God even in the hardest of times, and put a note on your fridge, to remind yourself to pray for those in Hurricane Florence’s path.

Karen Y. Stevens is the founder of Orange County Christian Writers Guild