Flood!

The destructive power of water has been awesome and frightful to behold these last few days. I tried to get into JPII on Sunday afternoon, but Caldwell Drive was underwater, making passage into the school impossible, as seen here:



Our lacrosse, baseball, softball and soccer fields were completely submerged, as you can see here:



When the waters recede from our playing fields, it's going to be one ugly, muddy mess.

Only the roofs could be seen of our neighbor’s homes alongside Vietnam Vets (look carefully in the middle right of the video below):



Please pray for our neighbors, as they likely lost everything.

God has a way of reminding us he’s still in charge. It’s easy for us to forget that. When it gets too hot outside, we have air-conditioning. If it’s too cold, heating. We have erected towering skyscrapers, conquered the airways, landed men on the moon and sent unmanned spacecrafts to Mars and beyond. These achievements reflect our intelligence and ingenuity, but they also tempt us to believe we sole masters of our fate, able to control all that is around us.

The most poignant story for modern man in the Old Testament may be the Tower of Babel. “Come, let us build ourselves a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves”, they said. Upset by their pride, God gave them different languages, confusing them, causing them to discontinue their empire building.

I don’t mean to say that all successful people are unduly proud. But success can seduce us, if we’re not careful, into believing we are no longer in need of God’s grace and assistance. If there are “no atheists in the foxholes”, as the saying goes, then the opposite is also true: there are too few believers among the affluent and successful.

Most of us have been merely inconvenienced by this weekend’s flooding. Let’s pray for all those who have truly been hurt by it. For all of us, however, may unexpected weekends like this one remind us that we are not the Creator, but the created.