Cybercolumn by John Duncan: Hope abounds_11005

Posted: 1/07/05

CYBER COLUMN:
Hope abounds

By John Duncan

I’m sitting here under the old oak tree, pondering the horrors of the devastating tsunami. I find myself grieving at a distance as I observe the pain and misery.

I saw a picture of a girl standing in a crowd of onlookers. She held a sign scribbled with letters: “Looking for lost parents, brothers and sisters.” I cannot imagine the pain, the emotion, or, in the poetic words of W.B. Yeats in his poem, “The Second Coming,” the loss: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

I think of a little girl who suddenly has to grow up. Her innocence lost, darkness surrounds, and life leaps forward with fury. Still, hope abounds in human existence.

We live in historic days. Amid the triviality of Dallas Cowboy losses and paying off Christmas debt, history has been made. According to a government web site, the 2004 tsunami appears to be the most deadly in recorded history. The most deadly tsunami prior to this was the result of an earthquake near Awa, Japan, in 1703 that killed 100,000. Forty-thousand people were killed in 1782 by a tsunami in the South China Sea, and the tsunami created by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa is thought to have resulted in 36,000 deaths. The most deadly tsunami between 1900 and 2004 occurred in Messina, Italy, on the Mediterranean Sea, where an earthquake and tsunami killed 70,000 in 1908. The most deadly tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean resulted from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that, combined with the toll from the earthquake and resulting fires, killed more than 100,000. Still, hope abounds in the center of history.

Nature rampages at times and presents itself a monster on the march—earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, winds that turn over trucks, rains that drench earth while flooding city streets, and fires that blacken places like Yellowstone National Park.

The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins was right, “Nothing is so beautiful as spring / When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush.” But he was also right in declaring in despair that life “yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.” Life captures us, takes us prisoner and instigates a sorrowful sadness not soon satisfied. Nature marches like a monster. Pain arrives as an unwelcome guest. Life hurts. Still, hope shines like a ray of sunlight at the center of nature.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “We must continue to emphasize that Christ is truly the center of human existence, the center of history and now also the center of nature.”

Jesus simplified life, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).

A new year stands before us. Grief looms, relief efforts unfold, dreams generate in the mind, and God invites us into the center of life. In the midst of human existence in its misery, history in its data and nature on rampage, the hope of Christ still invites us to find comfort and strength. Make Christ the center of your existence—your existence, your history and your nature.

John Duncan is pastor of Lakeside Baptist Church in Granbury, Texas, and the writer of numerous articles in various journals and magazines.