"’Have God on your side, definitely have God on your side,’ Nancy Noble said as she sat with her puppy and three friends in six lanes of one-way traffic on gridlocked Interstate 10. ‘It's very frightening.’"
That’s the quote according to AP reporters overseeing Katrina passing through.
I thought how interesting it is to note people’s expressions concerning deity when faced with calamity. I think it’s especially fascinating to note such persons’ comments when these very individuals live in America.
Yet the ACLU and team would make the United States another godless Europe — secularized to the hilt. However, when disaster strikes or threatens, mortals call out for God.
When 9 / 11 struck us to our knees, Congresspersons of both parties met on the Capitol steps to sing "God Bless America." We heard more about God during those days than in a decade of Billy Graham crusades.
Yet when the winds die down and the waves recede, it’s back to waging the war for God’s presence in a nation that has had a God-base to it all along. That base is totally ignored by the atheists, agnostics and secular-prone who hit the headlines with their anti-God rhetoric.
But after awhile when another disaster potential hits across someplace in America, God surfaces once again to the top of soul and brain. Mouths open wide to cry out for divine intervention.
Even there in New Orleans one of the women was wearing a T-shirt with a gross saying scrawled across the front of it. She told a reporter that if she were going to die, she didn’t want to die in that T-shirt!
I asked myself, "Why not, lady? You were in it while you were breathing. Why not brag on it while under water?"
It’s because her conscience started perking when she thought of dying, giving an account of her earthly sojourn and facing the Almighty in judgment. It wouldn’t, in other words, be cool to be sporting that kind of rude, crude saying on the front of her belly in a solo audience with God.
It never fails. When America is having a high ol’ time of it, God can get lost in the back bleachers. But when America is being sliced somewhere somehow, God plays a significant role in coming through to save and rescue.
So now with Katrina, nothing’s changed. Once again God is recognized, believed in, called upon and even beseeched as savior in the midst of flood waters a-coming. How very interesting, isn’t it?
All the while, I wonder what God thinks about all this teeter-totter attention given and not given the One who oversees all taking place upon His footstool.
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Email: joseph_swank@yahoo.com
Related: Oh New Orleans, shed ye the darkness or face disaster
