“No Hope”

Fox News Photo: May 12: Rescuers search for students at Juyuan Middle School in Juyuan Township of Dujiangyan City, China. 900 students were in the school at the time of the earthquake.

The headline from the New York Times article reads, “‘No Hope’ For Children Buried in Earthquake.” While we were celebrating Mother’s Day here in the states, mothers across the world were tucking their children into bed, waking them up, feeding them breakfast, and sending them off to school. Little did the mothers in Dujiangyan know that they would never see their children again. When the tumultuous quake hit, the school was leveled taking 300 lives with it.

The article is heart-breaking as it says, “Little remained of the original structure of the school. No standing beams, no fragments of walls. The rubble lay low against the wet earth. Dozens of people gathered around in the schoolyard, clawing at the debris, kicking it, screaming at it. A man and woman walked away from the rubble together. He sheltered her under an umbrella as she wailed, ‘My child is dead! Dead!'” This is just a bit of the tragedy striking the region, where 10,000 are estimated dead.

Not too far away, the country of Myanmar is sifting through their own tragedy from the cyclone that hit the country last week. Two million people are waiting for food and basic necessities or their bodies will be added to the death count of 32,000 (which could climb as high as 100,000). (Full article)

It seems piddly to mention the tornadoes that ravaged the Midwest, but 24 lives were lost, homes were destroyed, and lives were forever changed (story). No matter what the death toll or how heavy the damage, loss is still loss.

All these events center around a theme that seeks to capture my heart so very often–there is NO HOPE (or as the Trekkies say, “Resistance is futile”). I’ve never had to scour through the bits and pieces of my home wondering what would happen next. I know what it’s like to feel that your life has been ripped wide open, but never had the same thing happen with my residence.

Death, destruction, disaster, chaos–there is no seemingly no hope. I’d like to think that there are a few little hearts beating under the pile of rubble that was once Juyuan Middle School in China, but I don’t know. I’d like to believe that everyone will be OK, but some will probably go stark raving mad at the trauma of it all. Some people will never recover from this tragedy, physically, financially, or emotionally. The only hope, then, lies in the spiritual, in a God who is in the business of hope.

Hope has to remain, even though it can make little sense. The chance there could be a life under the rubble makes people claw at it like animals. Our belief that lives should be saved helps to send tons of food over to devastated countries and helps us rebuild the homes of our own citizens. Though they have little or no hope, we must hope for them because they cannot hope for themselves. And we should be on our knees before the Living God asking for His grace and mercy to be shown to these people as never before, for we do not hope foolishly; we hope faithfully.