This is the third instalment of our Easter Monday triumvirate of life-affirming posts.
It’s an account, published last week by The Times of London, of how an Italian doctor was led mysteriously to the precise place where his 20-year-old son lay trapped alive following last week’s devastating earthquake in Italy.
The article, tilted how “Divine intervention helped Antonello Colangeli find his son,” describes the inexplicable series of events that guided Dr. Colangeli to where his beloved only son Giulio lay entombed in the rubble of a building and that resulted in his rescue.
Inexplicable, that is, if you don’t credit the power of prayer and the intervention of a loving God.
A serious question, one that I wrestle with whenever I read stories like this:
Doesn’t crediting prayer and God’s intervention for the saving of this one life after the earthquake logically mean that we should acknowledge a failure of prayer and God’s intervention to prevent the hundreds of deaths the earthquake did cause?
ember, yes, you could logic it out that way…if God had human limitations. He tells us, “My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts.” If you are content to let God be God, to acknowledge that He is indeed in charge, the saving of one life and the expenditure of many others is not problematic. Death is not the end of the matter for anyone. If we die, we die in the mercy of God; if we live, we live in the mercy of God. If is for the living to acknowledge God’s mercy and to live in His service. The dead are in God’s hands; all our questioning, or doubting, or outright railing agaist God does not change that. You, ember, are alive by God’s mercy; live into that fact. God bless you. Frances Scott