Looking out for #1 - Part II
The below mentioned article struck me in another way. I've often wondered about people who lose their faith because of a tragedy. People always have serious questions about God and the meaning of suffering when they are confronted with an awful event such as Hurricane Katrina. There is nothing unusual or even wrong with that kind of questioning. It becomes dangerous when such a person persists in what is an explicitly selfish line of thinking.
The woman in the article said that she lost her faith in God because of the devastation caused by Katrina. Being a resident of New Orleans at that time, she witnessed all of it personally. But, in our age of information, we've all had ample enough information about any tragedy to question God and potentially lose our faith. Why wouldn't seeing the devastation from the Tsunami cause her to lose her faith? Why wouldn't reading about Auschwitz in her history classes cause her to lose her faith? It seems that her loss of faith isn't so much about trusting a God that could let this happen as it is about trusting a God who could let this happen to her.
I've dealt with similar issues when people suffering an unexpected loss of a loved one. I had one such person begin to question God's fairness in allowing ‘bad people to live but good people to die young.’ This is a natural response to such an event; but the questioning continued to the point where this person was seriously considering giving up believing in a fair and just God. So, in a loving way, I had to point out to that she had to witness many similarly unfair happenings in her life—through friends, news, history, etc. Why was it this event that caused her to think this way? It was because the unfairness hit closer to home than it ever had before.
Both types of situations provide genuine opportunity to bring people back to the person of Jesus Christ. He is the only one who provided a cure for selfishness and a demonstration of absolute selflessness.