My head feels badly bruised and battered. I feel the blood trickling down from my head to my face as I struggle in the dark, buffeted by unceasing winds and a torrential downpour. It is only now that we are seeing the full impact of super-typhoon Yolanda: utter devastation that wiped out a whole city, hundreds of lives lost even in evacuation centers because of the storm surges, years of work lost in but a day of wind and torrents. A father stands devastated before a rubble that used to be the home he painstakingly put up over the years for his family, not knowing where or how to start rebuilding. A mother kneels in grief over the dead body of a child she could not save from the rampaging flood waters, feeling she is on the brink of going crazy for she also had lost another child to the earthquake last week. A child crying in her hunger and aloneness, not yet even aware that she has lost both parents and her siblings in this yet another disaster.
The world watches and there are those who would romanticized our sufferings and pain away by condescendingly extolling our resilience in the face of seemingly unending adversity. There are those who are offering prayers of thanksgiving that the storm was not any worse and the destruction more severe. There are those who would put those who did not suffer on a guilt trip just to get them to help and give more to their organizations for the relief work.
Yet, the pain would not go away. Nor is the suffering any more bearable despite all the good intentions and the prayers. I pray hard and I pray deep to see the meaning of all of this, to see but a glimpse of God in all the pain and destruction. But the devastation looks so utter and total. This is just too big a price to pay for the resurrection and to enter eternal life. And my God just keeps His silence.
“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.”
Luke 20:27-38