What was Your Soul-Bending Disaster?

Mine was 9/11, of which today is the 24^th Anniversary.  First time in 24 years that I woke up and remembered as my day began.  I usually have it etched deeply, in the days leading up.  Is that healing?  Or is that forgetting?  Are those mutually exclusive?

I call it soul-bending, because, for me, its not soul-breaking.  Hurricane Sandy is my soul-breaker.  A soul-bender is one that humans inflict upon humans.  A soul-breaker is one that God inflicts upon us.  The biggest difference, so far, because humans are ever resourceful in the ways of sin and death, is that a soul-bender has a beginning and an end and edges that can be traced.

The school shootings, Columbine haunts me, and Sandy Hook Elementary, studying Breslan educated me in ways I don’t want to talk about, Oklahoma City, the first attack on the World Trade Centers, those are my adult lifetime events.  In my grandparents generation, it was Pearl Harbor.  Big, terrible in their surprise and their ferocity, but with clear edges.  It ended at the edges of the school or at the edges of the perpetrator being caught.  Even if it took years to end Osama Ben Laden.

It is soul bending what humans can do to each other.  But we keep pushing the boundaries, the edges, the borders.  I am thinking about Gaza.

Hurricane Sandy was soul breaking because there was absolutely nothing we could do to prevent it, except maybe if we’d made ecological choices going back over the decades.  Hurricane Katrina was the eye-opener for me, but Sandy was the one that blew through my neighborhood.  Unlike a human attack, a natural disaster is tied to a certain scale only because of decisions made way about the pay grade of any human being. 

Hurricane Sandy could have been bigger, way bigger, could have wiped so much more off the map.  Yes, we’ve gotten a lot better at watching and predicting and evacuating, but in the end, our strength is in our resilience in the face of destruction, not in our capacity to undo or prevent the disaster that God brings. 

When I say "soul-bender" or "soul-breaker", I am not trying to create a system to quantify and analyze reaction to disaster.  I am trying to use language to express what I haven't had words for to this point in time.  

One area of interest of mine is World War 2 history.  I know what happened at Pearl Harbor.  I have read various accounts, especially first hand accounts, watched the eyewitnesses testify to what happened, seen the media presentations.  Felt its power in my mind, but it was too distant, too alien to truly bend my soul.  There is truth when people tell you ‘You had to be there.’  Not there in the place, there in the time, there in the culture bound together in fear and grief in the aftermath.

My kids won’t ‘get it’ about 9/11, not the way I do.  I don’t ‘get it’ about Pearl Harbor, not like the folks we call ‘the Greatest Generation’.

So the pastor in me feels the need to work in the ‘Jesus angle’.  But this is an “Esther Post”.  I call it that because of the Book of Esther in the Bible of Jesus.  Powerful story, God is never referenced by name, but God’s presence is felt throughout.  Maybe you see it here, maybe you don’t, but the presence of my Lord is here too.  For me.  I hope for you.

Pastor Pete