A Merciful God Also Chastises

It wasn’t supposed to happen. The recent south Asian tsunami disaster is the kind of stuff you read in fictional books as incredulous smart alecks and practical atheists will tell you. But there’s no denying it. The cold hard facts are there for them to see.

Headlines bannered the grim news in the front pages of every major daily across the globe and news networks flashed real gripping footages of the disaster on their TV screens. The unthinkable inevitably happened.

The reality of the catastrophe’s nightmarish aftermath put these skeptics’ (un)beliefs on shaky ground. Literally. Almost two weeks after the 9.0-point earthquake that rocked Banda Aceh, Indonesia, repeated aftershocks continue to terrorize shell-shocked survivors who now begin to sift through the rubble as they turn over a new leaf in their lives.

The sheer scale of the destruction boggles the mind like a bee buzzing in one’s bonnet. Eleven countries suffered the brunt of the tsunami’s wrath yet over forty nationalities figured among the dead.

Mother Nature proved indiscriminate in her fury. She didn’t play favorites. Not even tree- hugging ecofreaks could have escaped the carnage. Whether one’s Caucasian or Asian, adult or child, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian, simply didn’t matter.

The cold and stiff corpses of well-heeled tourists and out of pocket beach hands and cleaning ladies on shoestring budgets ended up cheek-by-jowl in hastily dug mass graves; the poor and obscure literally brushed elbows with the rich and famous.

How does one make sense out of all this? Is this the handiwork of a vengeful God?

Dyed in the wool sentimental apologists readily give short shrift and take umbrage at those who insist that the greatest debacle in recent memory is God’s wake up call to repentance for mankind. They are at loggerheads over how God could have sown so much destruction and killed countless numbers of innocent children.

How convenient. Their selective and namby-pamby memories don’t seem to give a tinker’s damn to the Deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah, Herod’s slaughter of innocent infants, the fall and ruin of Jerusalem and much closer to home, the wanton destruction of Manila in 1945 or the more recent Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 - all of which transpired under the watchful eyes of an omniscient and all-merciful God.

It doesn’t take much brain to figure out how much man has strayed from God in the last 100 years. The proverbial writing is already on the wall. As one modern scribe aptly reminds us, C.S. Lewis once wrote, "pain is God's megaphone to a deaf world."

It is not for us little creatures of God to question His infinite and unfathomable Wisdom. He always acts with due proportion and utmost perfection. Not a single strand of hair falls from a man’s head without Him ever knowing it. Everything is weighed, counted and measured.

It behooves us to mark, learn and inwardly digest the hard and telling lessons of this Asian tsunami disaster. Perhaps, that’s just the ticket to save mankind from paying the devil and biting the dust.

The real and lasting solution, however, lies not in high-tech tsunami warning and earthquake monitoring devices but rather in sincere repentance, true conversion and amendment of life as the Mother of God had asked the world in Fatima 88 years ago. Lest we forget, the God of Mercy is ALSO the God of Justice!