The recent devastation on the East Coast from Hurricane Irene, as well as all the other natural disasters that occur around the world, often brings to mind questions about God, God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s will, God’s purpose, etc. But why does it usually take huge disasters like these to make us look at God’s role in our lives with a perspective larger than our own bubbles of luxury and comfort?

This past year, the Confirmation 1 retreat theme was “God Is.” NOT “God was..”, “God will be..”, or even “God is Love” because God is larger than our own comprehension! When we lose our sense of how much larger-than-life, how eternal, God is we begin to limit God and try to make God what we want God to be in our own lives as is most convenient for us. But it is when we face these troubling times we are sometimes made uncomfortable because the God we have created to be for us does not necessarily line up with the God we are experiencing in our lives or what God may be calling us to do with our lives. As Jack Jezreel, founder and director of JustFaith, said: “It’s my own experience that I grow spiritually, morally and even intellectually mostly by being made uncomfortable. I consider being made uncomfortable an attribute of the Holy Spirit.”

So in regards to these God-questioning moments like tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. we are forced to look beyond this man-made image of God to confront the God that works beyond our comprehension in our lives. In his article, Water or Ash: God in the Storm, Tim Muldoon says:

I recall these experiences to highlight a basic point: much of the time we live in ways that distract us from the large question of what living is for, and so situations of extremity force us to consider exactly what we think we’re doing. What I have found remarkable about these situations—dating back to a serious flood that struck my family’s home town when I was a boy—is how they can mobilize neighbors and create bonds of friendship absent in the course of “normal” life. There is logic to living in extremity that we ignore under normal circumstances. We don’t generally think about how much we need each other; we don’t think about food rationing, or preserving water access, or checking regularly on the elderly and infirm. We in the developed West have become accustomed to isolation, and have in large part forgotten what it’s really like to think as a community, helping each other to survive and thrive. Losing this big picture, it is very easy to think of life in small, manageable chunks oriented around the small question of what we think we want.

I find it compelling to think of God questions as those which face us when we emerge from our smallness. Many raise these questions only in times of extremity, as if God’s only role is to throw disasters at us every now and again. God becomes the enemy to be overcome with good planning. To be sure, God is in the storm, the earthquake, the tsunami—but God is also in the rescue, the selfless act, the courageous response, the loving community we become aware of when our defenses are down. Against those who would preach a tame, sweet, nice God, I see a God who is master of the winds and rain, time and eternity, to whom we wail upon the death of thousands and praise upon the rescue of a single soul. But most of all, I see a God who, when life is stripped down to its barest minimum, can emerge softly because the noise of the world is no longer in the way.

May the Holy Spirit make us uncomfortable.

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Dennis Pangindian

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