The Wrong Questions

Last night, I caught myself asking, “Why Oklahoma City? What did they do to anybody?"

The area was hit with tornadoes only two weeks after the community of Moore was devastated by a twister. One of the tornadoes that affected the region last night was reported in Moore, though it was only a shadow of the earlier version. Even so, it was a tornado, and it was Moore. Last night’s destruction over the general area was widespread.

When you ask a question like, “Why them?” you are heading down the road preacher Pat Robertson wants you to travel – do you really want to go there? He has answered such questions, of course, by saying that disasters are visited upon areas that deserve it because of some pervading pattern of immorality, like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible.

But by those standards, parts of both coasts of the United States, including the place I’m living in, should have long since broken off and sunk into the sea – but I’m still here. And when you think of hotbeds of immorality, well, Oklahoma isn’t the first place that comes to mind.

So if you can’t think of a reason that God visits catastrophes on places like Oklahoma City, then you’re led to another question: Does God send such things? If he (she) doesn’t, who does?

The ultimate and most disturbing question is: If such awful things are allowed to happen to good people, is there a God at all? I would bet there is more than one person in Moore asking that question this morning – and most of us probably wouldn’t blame them.

We yearn to have such questions answered, and over time, we realize that nobody, least of all the Pat Robertsons of the world, can answer them for us. Peace is only achieved when we can answer them for ourselves – or when we can agree to stop asking those questions and move on to more important ones.

The only real progress comes in the answer to this: What are you going to do about it? That’s also a question that requires an individual answer, and answering that one is how we grow. Perhaps we can give God credit for helping us do that. Or not.

We don’t all grow the same way. It may be momentarily inspiring to see those people on TV standing in front of their flattened homes, telling reporters how they’re not discouraged and how they plan to rebuild in the same place. But for others, the answer may be, “I’m outta here!”

In the great scheme of things, of course, there is no “outta here” – if you live in the Plains and decide to leave, you’re simply trading in tornadoes for something else: hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, wildfires or combinations of all of them. Building somewhere else isn’t going to keep s**t from happening to us.

It’s what we build after it happens to us that matters. It’s not about simply replacing a physical structure or possessions. It’s about whether tragedy can be transformed into a solid foundation for building a new life. That’s the question we should be trying to answer.

But if at this moment you’re standing in front of your flattened home, and you don’t feel like coming up with the answer right this minute to inspire the rest of us, well, far be it from me to judge you for it.