"The City of New Orleans"

Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

The other day I watched a video from CNN.com that showed clips of New
Orleans while this song played in the background. I haven't been able to
get it out of my head ever since.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem. The funny thing is, I don't even watch or pay much attention to the news. I'm sure everyone else has seen the images and video clips of the destruction in New Orleans way more than I have. But see it or not, it has been on my mind.

Everyone and their brother has already blogged about this. Maurice had a good blog entry about it, I know, as did Crystal. I'm not sure what I think I can really add to the conversation.

Maurice (or should I say "a friend"?) and Sally and I got into a discussion about all of this on Sunday night. Heh... in fact, I'm sure the wheels were turning and Maurice was already writing his blog entry in his head, since the conversation started because I'd asked him what he was thinking about.

We started discussing why God would allow something like this to happen. I've heard from some who think it was something to the effect of judgment on the city. This led us to the topics of both the flood (you know, Noah and the ark?) and Sodom and Gomorrah. In both of these instances, God made sure to get the righteous people out before destroying the place. Was that the case with New Orleans?

Going back to God's promise after the flood... (from The Message translation):

"I'll never again curse the ground because of people. I know they have this bent toward evil from an early age, but I'll never again kill off everything living as I've just done."

What exactly does that mean, "curse the ground"? One might think that God's intention in saying this was that he meant that he would never again destroy the whole earth. But he also said he'd never "curse the ground because of people". If this means he'd never cause mass destruction because of people's sin, what about Sodom and Gomorrah? Well, what if that wasn't "cursing the ground" like the flood did? Sodom and Gomorrah burnt TO the ground. So maybe that was different.

Really, I don't claim to know that any of this is the case. Just some thoughts and discussion. But honestly, I do think that we try to answer too many questions when something like this happens. Why did it happen? Why did God LET it happen? I find my answer for that in the passage from Job that Maurice posted:

“Do you presume to tell me what I'm doing wrong? Are you calling me a sinner so you can be a saint? Do you have an arm like my arm? Can you shout in thunder the way I can? Go ahead, show your stuff. Let's see what you're made of, what you can do. Unleash your outrage. Target the arrogant and lay them flat. Target the arrogant and bring them to their knees. Stop the wicked in their tracks--make mincemeat of them! Dig a mass grave and dump them in it--faceless corpses in an unmarked grave. I'll gladly step aside and hand things over to you--you can surely save yourself with no help from me!”

(Just for the record, I reserve the right to post this too, since I was the one that brought up and read this passage from The Message as a part of our discussion... heh.)

Why try to find answers when you know you don't have the complete picture? Is that really what's important? Why can't we just be content with having questions? We know we'll always have questions about something. Why try so hard to figure out the ones that we can't answer?

I've also heard complaints and commentary about the crime going on in New Orleans since the hurricane. Looting, shooting at people, raping, etc. Now before I say anything... my disclaimer: I do NOT think these things are right, obviously. And I do not just discount the fact that they're being done. These things seem crazy to us. But wouldn't you be a little crazy if you'd lost your home, had no way to go anywhere, and didn't know where your family was or even if they were alive? These crimes aren't right, we all know that. But I don't think anyone that's not in the position of these people can claim to know that they wouldn't do something crazy if put in the same situation.

So I guess my thoughts are that I don't know why this happened, and I don't feel much of a need to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. And instead of looking back and placing blame on anyone, I'd rather just realize that it's a very sad situation all around. Yes, I'm sure there are ways that it could've been prevented. But it wasn't. So isn't it best to look FORWARD instead of back and do what we can to help NOW?

I've been trying to figure out the best way I can do that. I'm not really in a place where I can donate much financially, and since I've never really been in that place, I think I tend to try to look for more "hands-on" ways of helping. I found out about the Katrina Project, so I'm trying to find a way I can help with that through both of the church communities that I'm a part of. I checked out IUPUI's page of hurricane relief efforts, and found out that the Red Cross is looking for volunteers for their National Call Center (NCC) for Hurricane Relief. So I have an email out about that.

And then, through someone else's blog, I discovered that Red Cross was looking for people to "advertise" about hurricane relief efforts on their websites. So here's my contribution to that:

Do what you can.