Homes, businesses left in ruins as tornado death toll climbs in Nashville
Grady Trimble reports from the hardest hit area of East Nashville.
Parts of Nashville were devastated by a tornado last week. The destruction was terrible. People lost their homes, cars and in some cases lives.
I heard stories of people pulling their children from their beds as bedroom windows exploded inward and roofs were being torn off. One husband and wife in Putnam County survived by hiding in a bathtub as their house was torn off its foundation and thrown 50 yards like a toy.
I spent the last few days helping people cut downed trees in yards and separate pieces of house from treated lumber. The sheer number of volunteers who showed up to help (very few of whom lived in the affected area) was mind-boggling.
There were many well-organized relief efforts, but most I encountered were people with chainsaws, shovels, pry-bars and work gloves who just showed up and walked into the chaos.
I watched one man monotonously rolling a construction magnet back and forth down the street for hours to pick up nails and pieces of metal so they wouldn’t puncture the tires of trucks hauling wreckage. After the third time he passed, I commented, “That’s smart." He replied, “I don’t know how smart I am. I’m just trying to help however I can.”
Last Saturday my wife and I took our 3 kids to East Nashville. The most dangerous aspects of the cleanup had been taken care of so we brought a wagon full of Gatorade, bottled water and Twix bars for them to hand out to relief workers.
When we were driving home my 5-year-old daughter called out from the backseat, “Mama and Daddy, why did God make tornadoes?”
Oof.
It was not just a good question. It was the question. It is one that if the tornado victims are not already asking they will probably be asking over the coming days, months and maybe years. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t have a great answer.
I flipped my daughter’s question over for days and it quickly became my question. How do you reconcile a Jesus who in the book of Matthew comforts people dealing with anxiety by telling them to consider the way God cares for the lilies of the field only to see those very lilies ripped up by the roots and driven through the wall of a house by a tornado?
“Why?” indeed.
When tragedy comes, the Why? question is more than reasonable. It is unavoidable. We were created for meaning and we will demand it. The problem is tragedies like this seem so meaningless.
The tightest theology and best-intended explanations can’t always resolve the dissonance we experience between an all-powerful and loving God and a very powerful and unloving tornado.
Yes, God is still good and all-powerful...but tornadoes are still not.
What do we do with that?
Did God cause it, permit it, allow it?
Whatever your theology, you can only cut the accountability pie so many creative ways. In the end, you can’t really let Him off the hook.
It is in moments like this that we have to consider the heart of God; the only way to do that is to look at the visible expression of the invisible God Himself, Jesus (Col. 1:14).
Before the beginning began, Jesus was with God and was God (John 1:1). He spoke the world into being, but not before looking down the hallway of time and seeing His people for all we are and all with which we would contend.
His heart broke; so much so He denied Himself the peace and comfort of His throne to dress himself in the torn experiences of our lives. His rejection, mutilation and public murder were not things that happened to Him. They were things He chose.
Why? So He could be with us. Grow us. Usher us forward.
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To consider this is to consider the heart of God. To consider His heart makes me consider my own. It is there I can begin to ask a better question: What makes me think that a Jesus who was willing to go to such extremes for me/you/us has let go now? Even in my most cynical moments, that just doesn’t make sense.
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This is where the anemic muscle of my faith begins to flex. Only a little at first, but mustard seeds and all that (Luke 17:6)... that’s all He asks.
This is where hope begins to grow. It did for me. Then I could say: There is plenty I wish God was doing...but considering the extent He has gone for us...I can trust, as it is often said, that there is nothing He should be doing that He is not doing (John 5:17). And what God does will ultimately and bring goodness (Rom. 8:28).
Yes, there is an answer to the “Why?” There is meaning. I just cannot see it.
For now, it’s OK to be sad. It’s OK to be angry.
If it was OK for Jesus to be sad and angry standing outside Lazarus’ tomb even when He knew that in 5 minutes He was going to raise him from the dead (John 11:35), then it’s OK for us.
That is not some spiritual Band-Aid. That is the backbone of our faith.
We were driving out of East Nashville on Saturday and as I watched hundreds of relief workers moving through the streets, I thought to myself: This is dark, but even in the darkness good is still very much in play.
Those people walking in and out of crushed houses were a finger pointing to God and a reminder of the heart behind Jesus’ words: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
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And it won’t.
Today, tomorrow and for all eternity.