Where is God now? - Devotion for 5/7/09

Where is God now? – Devotion for 5/7/09

The week after Easter I was able to go with a mission work team from the church out to Beaumont, TX, where we were engaged in helping people recover from the damaging hurricanes Ike and Rita that hit last year. Though I’ve been a part of mission work teams for hurricane recover before, it has been several years, and I think that somehow as time goes by you seem to become anesthesitized to what you are seeing. Being there that week reminded me of how amazingly powerful nature can be. I think it all really hit home for me on our next to last day there when we had finished up the work that we had been assigned to do, and so we took a drive to Galveston to see the damage. Breathtaking is truly the best word I can think of to describe what I felt. For miles all you could see was pylons of where homes once stood. Half a mile or so from the road you could see cars that had been washed away and carried off. It simply looked like God had taken his arm and wiped the face of the earth in the same way that I may clean off the kitchen table after the boys have eaten. I can only begin to imagine how those people felt when they came back and saw what was left behind. It truly put my own troubles and difficulties into perspective.

I know that many times in those types of situations people will ask the question, “Where is God in all of this?” That being said, that very question is being asked right now by people near each and every one of us as we are facing such troubling times. Many people have attributed the suffering of so many in our country to what they deem as our country turning away from God. I’ve heard some remark that they think that God has abandoned the blessing of America because America has abandoned God. I really, really, really do not like that mode of thinking. Because I think that we can see God all around us in the middle of the difficult and trying times.

During the First World War, many of the battles were fought in muddy trenches, with soldiers looking through barbed-wire for their enemy, who was down in a muddy trench doing the same thing. Two particular soldiers were side by side, and as they surveyed the battlefield before them, they saw the barbed wire strewn about, they saw the mud holes, and the broken bodies of men. The younger soldier asked, “Captain, where is God in all of this?” At that moment, two non-combatant stretcher-bearers climbed over the top and moved out under enemy fire to pick up a wounded soldier. At that moment, the captain turned to the young soldier and said, “Look, Son, there God is. There goes God now.”

God is present throughout America. He is found in the people who are willing to serve Him. He is found in those who are His hands and feet – reaching out to the least, to the last, and to the lost.