Haiti and God.

Listening to R4 this morning I was taken aback at the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was asked why this God we all kill ourselves over (my words) was allowing such tragedy as we are now seeing in Haiti. He seemed to be saying that “God also cries.” Don’t they a;ways have an answer that absolves this God. I am not a church going person, although when I was in secondary school, which was a boarding school, I was marched to church every Sunday. I had a granny who thought nothing of putting the fear of God into us. Then when she dies we discovered that she had a past, which broke one of the Ten Commandments.

I was brought up in a God fearing community and so in times of serious trouble in my own life, I suppose it was natural that I prayed to God to deliver me from evil. However it is at times such as these when we see possibly 500,000 people dead in Haiti from an earthquake that I question this God who we all kill each other over and say to him. “ OK you are the big man that created all of this, why then do you stand back and watch your people suffer so much, you have the power of creation yet you cannot stop this from happening, why should I believe in you?” It takes a very special strength of faith to believe that a God if he exists would watch this and just cry.

These people who had nothing, lived on nothing and knew nothing but hardship all their lives, babies, woman, young people old and sick trapped and dying a horrible death. And the world stands back and watches. We who worry about replacing power lines through a Glen, politicians who play weasel games with semantics just to score a cheap political point, to make them feel better. Bankers who sit calculating how to get another million into their pockets. Moaning about the lack of snow ploughs and having to walk to the shops.. And then we see Haiti and it all looks so shallow and selfish and utterly pointless. God if you are there please help them. Help us to help them.