I have not been able to put it out of my mind. Not because disasters are rare ΓÇö sadly, they are not ΓÇö but because of the ordinariness of that afternoon. No one pitches a tent beside a mountain stream expecting to meet eternity before supper. They came for rest. And that is precisely what unsettles us about such news: it collapses the comfortable distance between their afternoon and ours.
Our Lord was once asked about a tragedy like this one ΓÇö a tower that fell without warning and crushed the people beneath it. His answer has always stopped me in my tracks. "Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:4-5)
Notice what Jesus refuses to do. He refuses the cruel arithmetic that treats calamity as a verdict on its victims. The dead of Siloam were not worse than their neighbors, and the campers of Weiyuan County were not worse than you or me. When we hear of sudden death and quietly assure ourselves that such things happen to other kinds of people in other kinds of places, we are telling ourselves a lie that Jesus will not permit. Instead, He turns the question around and lays it gently but firmly at our own door: are you ready? Not "why did this happen to them," but "what will you do with the day you have been given?"
That is not morbid. It is mercy. A person who knows his days are numbered holds them differently ΓÇö more loosely in his hands, more dearly in his heart. He forgives faster. He prays more honestly. He stops postponing the conversation with God that he has been meaning to have. The suddenness of that flood is a sermon none of us asked for, but it is one we would be foolish to ignore.
And yet the story from Gansu is not only a story of loss. It is also a story of hundreds of men and women who moved toward the danger, wading into a flooded valley to pull strangers from the water and the debris. Whenever I see that ΓÇö rescuers going in while everything in nature says get out ΓÇö I see a fingerprint of the God who made us. We were built to bear one another's burdens. I found myself praying for those rescue teams, for the injured in their hospital beds, for parents who left home with their children and returned without them, and for the believers in China who will now have occasion to weep with those who weep and to speak a word of hope in the valley of the shadow.
To the grieving, Scripture does not offer the false promise that the waters will never come. It offers something sturdier: the promise of a Presence in the waters. "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee." (Isaiah 43:2) That promise was sealed by One who Himself passed through the flood of death and came out the other side alive, so that everyone who trusts in Him may follow Him through.
So tonight, hold your people close. Say the thing you have been meaning to say. Make peace where peace is needed. And entrust your soul ΓÇö this very evening ΓÇö to the God who does not stand on the far bank shouting instructions, but who steps into the water beside us, and whose grip does not fail.