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Yesterday I received a tweet about the earthquake and tsunami:

“This could possibly be judgment. A village with 9,500 people is missing. This is beyond an earthquake this is a wakeup call”

Why are people so ready to believe God works this way?  He doesn’t. Earthquakes and the tsunamis they trigger are part of the process that allows the Earth to keep supporting life.  The subduction process, where plates covered by ocean are being pulled under the continents–the process is essential to maintianing the carbon cycle and in the distribution of O2 and CO2 on the planet. As the Oceanic plate subducts, a lot of the water  and methane in the upper levels is squeezed out creating a super oxygenated/carbon rich zone along our shores.  As the plate is pulled under the continent, it starts to melt and the remaining water gets hot enough to turn to gas–this process leads to the volcanic eruptions that distribute the Oxygen all around the world.

This process causes a lot of stress to build up that is periodically releaved–earthquakes and tsunamis are a result of that.  I would think that the fact that we are provided warning after warning that this process takes place would matter.  The areas where earthquakes and tsunamies happen have signs that show us that they do–often with hundreds of years warning.    Why aren’t we welcoming the warning and acting on it?

Again and again I hear the idea that we aren’t supposed to act on the warnings, we are supposed to leave things to God.  Poor God must be hitting his forehead.  We know that ‘Physics Happens’.  We know  what, and generally where it will happen and we know how it is going to happen-but we aren’t going to act to step out of the way of it happening.  We are going to ask God to create miracles just for us–to make the law of physics change so that a building that is unlikely to hold up to shaking will hold up for us.  So that an area that shows signs of having been carved out by water repeatedly in the past–that area will not have water pass through it while we live there.

God loves us.  He does not lure only the people he feels need to be judged into dangerous areas–we are the ones that move there, we are the ones that build there, and we are the ones that refuse the hundreds upon hundreds of helpful signs that He really wish we wouldn’t.

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