Not much to say
It has been a while since I posted on my blog. It just seems that I have not had anything profound to say. Exams, grading and the holiday season just seemed to have exhausted my mental resources, and no thoughts of genius have been coming to me.
One thing I have been contemplating over the last week has been the Tsunami tragedy in the Indian Ocean. People in general respond strangely to death. The terror and grief have been felt worldwide, and I too have been grieving for the families of the lost. The strange thing is that everyone knows we will all die someday. All 120,000 people would have been lost at one time or another. It seems alright to many when one lonely ederly person dies alone in a nursing home. Not true though if you were that person dyeing. Death is inevitable, it is horrific and tragic no matter the circumstances. We should all learn from Jim Elliot when he said "make sure when it is time to die the only thing you have left to do is die."
If you have faith in Christ, share it NOW with the world. If you have not surrendered to Christ do it immediately. How many of those 120,000 people do you suppose figured they had plenty of time to come to terms with their maker. Death is final and it will get us all in the end.
posted by hossradbourne @ 1:57 PM
4 Comments:
your right Robert it has been quite awhile since you have posted!! haha! Anyway yeah you're right about how everyone dies at some point and everything. And for once i am totally agreeing with you; people get all worked up about 120,000 people dying, but who cares about the old people that die alone and bitter in nursing homes. ya know those old people have a reason to be bitter...hey if my kids put me in a nursing home and rarely came to see me, i think i'd be a little bitter towards people too! well i guess i'll see you in class!
~your FAVORITE student!
I'm afraid I can't share that side of the issue right now, Robert. While I understand what you're saying and don't dispute the premise (ie, we all die), I think there's much more to this particular tragedy. For one thing, thousands of children were lost to the tsunami. Many more were left parentless, and many more will perish to disease and despair in the coming weeks (and despair is a disease itself, in a sense).
I have to agree with some of the bloggers I've been reading on the matter. The question isn't whether this is a tragedy, nor is it whether we should grieve. The question is how do we as Christians respond to this? Do we fall back on the tired old cliches of chalking it up to the mystery of God or the presence of sin in the world? So we're back to the age-old question: how do we reconcile the idea of a loving Father (God) with the reality of suffering in the world? I think if Christians are to be taken seriously, we need to at least TRY to offer an explanation of a world in which ocean waves can suddenly rip children from their mother's arms. To quote someone else, who put it very plainly: "Why would God have wired the earth itself to unleash death and destruction once humanity rejected Him? Murder is a human creation; plate tectonics are not. Is not God culpable for earthquakes? And if God is culpable, is not the entire Christian worldview proved to be the illogical relic portrayed by the critics?"
As a Christian, I struggle with this (as I do with the book of Job), but I'm asking the questions and honestly seeking the answers, which to me is the right place to be. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I believe you are right. Mostly. However, I think why it is such a tragedy is the sheer mass of people who died so suddenly. If you would take the numbers of people who die each year in the entire world, it would astonish and horrify you. But they all didn't die at the same time. And, when each person dies,there's no horrible footage of it that they play 24/7.
I think the media has alot to do with magnifying the horror also. But I am prejudiced.
GJ
hey coop!!! HOWS EVERYTHING GOING WITH MEREDITH!!! lol you know i love we've got to talk about this.... you me and madi
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