Thoughts On The Earthquakes in Haiti and …

Thoughts On The Earthquakes in Haiti and Unceasing Creation

“What would you call it, if not arrogance? To believe we could build eternal cities upon a ball of fire with an ever shifting crust lashed by ocean currents and atmospheric turbulence that we never fully appreciated or understood? (From And The Dominoes Fall)

Those of you who read And The Dominoes Fall know that this theme runs through my novel. Creation is an ongoing process. Creation is ceaseless. I will go a step further: Death and resurrection, creation and new creation, this is the natural order of our world.

To view creation as something that happened a long time ago, happened, was completed is to diminish the awesome grandeur of creation. Creation is much more enduring, powerful and unstoppable.

I really like the following video because it animates not just the shifting plates in our planet’s past, but speculates about future shift. The movement of continents, past and future, reminds us that at any given moment we occupy nothing more than a grain in the shifting sands of time.

Those that view creation as something completed a long time ago encourage the view that natural disasters must be the wrath of God. Of course we have heard such talk over the past week. Sadly, this is all too predictable when one cannot contemplate continual creation.

The wrath should be at ourselves because we go about our pampered lives oblivious to human suffering until disaster reveals a horror too great to ignore. When an earthquake crushes so many structures, it reveals deplorable conditions in place long before the ground trembled.

Posted by: Jeff Masters
The catastrophic earthquake of 2010 is only the latest--and worst--natural disaster to devastate the nation of Haiti. Up until the quake, the hurricane season of 2008 was the cruelest natural disaster ever experienced in Haiti. Four storms--Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike--dumped heavy rains on the impoverished nation. The rugged hillsides, stripped bare of 98% of their forest cover thanks to deforestation, let flood waters rampage into large areas of the country. Particularly hard-hit was Gonaives, the fourth largest city. According to reliefweb.org, Haiti suffered 793 killed, with 310 missing and another 593 injured. The hurricanes destroyed 22,702 homes and damaged another 84,625. About 800,000 people were affected--8% of Haiti’s total population. The flood wiped out 70% of Haiti’s crops, resulting in dozens of deaths of children due to malnutrition in the months following the storms. Damage was estimated at over $1 billion, the costliest natural disaster in Haitian history. The damage amounted to over 5% of the country’s $17 billion GDP, a staggering blow for a nation so poor.

If natural disasters of a similar magnitude had hit the US in 2008 … well, that is more than I can contemplate. And yet the storms in Haiti garnered little notice outside relief groups, and those who track tropical storms. I have talked with several people who were not even aware of the 2008 storms in Haiti. They only had some vague notion that Haiti suffered.

Back to my thoughts on the ceaseless nature of creation: The following USGS graphic shows the location of the quake and aftershocks a week after -- about 50 aftershocks at that point. Look at the location of the quakes. Now while I have no idea of this is a possibility, looking at the images one can imagine the land in the process of breaking apart and forming a new island -- a new Jamaica. If such a thing were to happen I would call it a New Creation.

The Caribbean islands remind me of so many pieces from a jigsaw puzzle spread upon the sea. One can imagine how they might have fit together in this planet’s distant past.

And yet new creation/resurrection may take many forms. Some creations may be geographic; others may begin with new opportunities. While the people of Haiti struggle to overcome this nightmare, I pray the nations of the world will encourage a new beginning.

We must not think that because things have been a certain way for a long time, they must always be that way. Nothing in the nature of out planet is that stagnate. Change is always possible.

Restore this land that has suffered so brutally through deforestation and the people may also be renewed.

NOTE: While I am away over the next few weeks I will update on Twitter and Facebook.