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‹‹ Return
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Just how do We know God is with us?
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
1/7/2007
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[Episcopal Relief and Development]
"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you..." Isaiah 43:2
What does it look like for God to be with us when disaster strikes? Do we just smile through it all as the waters rise, serene and unruffled because we know God is there? I don't think many people who faced the deadly rush of water after Hurricane Katrina stood there smiling serenely -- they waded for their lives through the treacherous current, climbed up to their roofs, clung for dear life to a lamp post or a tree. There was no time for serenity on that terrible day, and I doubt if anyone was praying for serenity. The most one might hope for would be focus.
I may or may not be serene at a given moment of crisis, but then my serenity is not always the evidence of God's presence. We don't always find God in the causes of a tragedy, or even in our own experience of living through one. We may find God, instead, in the response of other human beings.
The American people's response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath was the biggest communal outpouring of love and support the nation has ever seen. We had had some practice: the response to New York's losses on 9/11 and the horror of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 were also immense. Something in us grew permanently as a result of knowing about these terrible things, and as a result of our participation in doing something about them. Helping seems to have made people want to help more. Something in us understood our relatedness as human beings in a new way. We derived a new sense of duty, one that kicked in readily when Katrina struck.
Through its work with local dioceses and ecumenical partners, under the guidance of bishops who know their own communities well, Episcopal Relief and Development continues to support community redevelopment in those places where community life was so devastated on those hot summer days in the late summer of 2005.
Perhaps we have changed. Perhaps we have developed institutional ways to be kinder and more aware of each other. Perhaps we feel more related. I pray that it is so. And, if it is, I think we have found just where God is when the waters rise.
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