The Impact of Writing About The Storms of Life

Friday I Provided Chaplaincy services to the staff at the Red Cross Disaster Call Center.

This is the type of ministry I thrive on in my professional chaplain career. My assignment was to be a support to the disaster call center staff.

Wow! What a tremendous service they were providing to hurting people, folk who had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

One young man asked if I would pray for him to have wisdom in how he answered victims of these devastating storms.

At one point of the afternoon, I told him about an article I had written just after Katrina’s ravaging impact on New Orleans and the Gulf States.

Friday I Provided Chaplaincy services to the staff a the Red Cross Disaster Call Center.

This is the type of ministry I thrive on in my professional chaplain career. My assignment was to be a support to the disaster call center staff.

Wow! What a tremendous service they were providing to hurting people, folk who had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

One young man asked if I would pray for him to have wisdom in how he answered victims of these devastating storms.

In the process of the afternoon, I told him about an article I had written just after Katrina’s ravaging impact on New Orleans and the Gulf States.

Becoming an Overcomer In the Tragedies of Life

Understanding The Impact Of The Storms Of Life

I cannot even imagine what the victims of tragedy are feeling right now. For example, the impact of Hurricane Kristina on a single individual’s life is devastating, let alone what has taken place to a city or a county or a state.

Just my opinion, but while cities can be rebuilt and even flourish again, some people never do rebuild their lives, and they are crushed by the weight of their losses.

Overcomers Display The Quality Of Resiliency

Yet there are those who seem to have the capacity to “bounce back” from disaster, defeat, and devastation. People who have this quality of resiliency are overcomers, to use a good, Bible term.

I believe it was Dr. Paul Tournier who suggested that we tend to ask three basic questions whenever tragedy strikes, be it a personal loss or an “Act of God” (ever notice how God gets blamed for natural tragedies? Then again, it is at least an admission of God’s existence.)

The Three Questions We Ask About Tragedy

Here are the three questions we tend to ask whenever we experience loss:

1. The first question is “Why?”.
   

   It may come in many forms but usually along the lines of “Why did God let this happen?” or “Why did we decide to move to the Gulf Coast?”. There are no adequate answers to the “Why” question and it keeps a person facing the wrong direction — trying to figure out the past.



2. The second question is “What if?”.
   

   This question is inadequate because any answer we come up with is fantasy, not fact. Asking “What if?” keeps a person spinning in their tracts, usually facing the wrong direction of life, and focuses on what is nothing more than the figment of one’s imagination.



3. The third question is “What now?” and is the only adequate question that can be asked if one is to be an overcomer. That key question that leads to overcoming, “What now?”, moves one to faith as they make the most of the storms of life.

Turning From The Past To Face The Future

It is only natural to ask “Why” and “What If” questions, but becomes an additional tragedy added to the other tragedies of life in that people get stuck or quagmired at those two questions.

Overcoming tragedy can become a real possibility when a person begins to ask “What now?”. Notice that asking this question turns a person from facing the past to facing the future.

I do not mean to trivialize the suffering of hurting people. But if one is to be an overcomer, it is only asking “What now?” that moves a person beyond blaming God or blaming oneself or others.

And so I ask myself and encourage you to do so too, “What now?”.

Onward with purpose,

Chaplain Paul