My Heart is Back Home in Oklahoma

Before yesterday, there were two dates that every Oklahoman knew and could recall exactly what they were doing on that day. The first is April 19, 1995. That is the morning that the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history occurred when the Alfred P. Murrah building was bombed. I was a junior in high school and I was in left field at the district baseball tournament. The second date is May 3, 1999, when a massive tornado with the highest winds ever recorded on earth (302 mph) destroyed the city of Moore, Oklahoma. I was a junior in college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. We watched the tornado hit on TV and then had to pack into a car and drive to campus to take shelter because a tornado was heading for Stillwater. In Oklahoma all you have to say is April 19 or May 3 and people know what you’re talking about.

As of yesterday, May 20 will be added to that list. I was with my family in the car on highway 35 headed back from the Jeffersonville (Ohio) Outlet Mall when Danielle saw something on Facebook on her phone. As more information came in I found out that the tornado had hit Briarwood Elementary School where my Aunt Pam is a teacher. As I was still driving, Danielle texted my aunt and found out that she was alive but that her school and car are completely gone. When we got home and turned on the national news our worst fears were realized—a massive tornado that was between ½ mile and 2 miles wide at different points had been on the ground for 40 minutes in one of the most densely populated areas of the state of Oklahoma just minutes from Norman where we lived before moving to Washington Court House. Danielle had worked in Moore and the kids had gone to a church day school in Moore just a mile or two from where the tornado hit. The tornado had followed almost the exact same path as the May 3, 1999 tornado. When we started hearing reports of the number of children who were missing or dead at the other elementary school that had been hit our hearts broke. Wyatt became very upset later that night when he realized what was going on and I found him watching the news this morning.

I am very, very sad today. For many people they become so sad that words cannot convey just how upset they are. I, on the other hand, tend to deal with my sadness through words. So I’m going to be completely honest with you. When things like this happen, I pray that God would help the survivors and rescuers, but I struggle with my faith too. When something awful like a school shooting happens, we can blame it on a sinful and/or mentally ill person having access to an arsenal of weapons. “God didn’t do this,” we say. “An evil, sinful person did this.” God does not override human free will because if God did then we could not truly love. Love cannot be coerced so evil must be allowed to stand as an option for people to choose. This is called “human evil” and I find it extremely convincing both on a numerically small scale (a man hits his wife) and on a massive scale (the Nazis murder millions of Jews, Homosexual Persons, Gypsies, and Disabled Persons.) But we can’t give that explanation when a massive tornado forms and wipes out a city and kills many people including children who were huddled together in their school. This is called “natural evil.”

Natural evil “just happens.” There is only so much we can do to counteract it. We can design better buildings and share this with others so that the people of Haiti can have buildings as good as the people in San Francisco. We can develop better warning systems and so on and so forth. We can provide mosquito netting and malaria vaccination. Sometimes natural evil combines with human evil, though, to make the results of the natural evil even worse. Think about how the levees in New Orleans that were supposed to protect the poorest of the poor were the very same levees that had not been built right and did not receive the additional work they had needed for a long time. In the case of what happened in Moore, Oklahoma yesterday, everything that could be done to save lives was done. The weather forecasting equipment in Oklahoma is miles ahead of everywhere else. When there is the threat of weather like that all the TV and radio stations switch to weather coverage. The buildings are built to withstand the typical tornado, or at least to allow the inhabitants to survive if they go to an interior closet or bathroom. The teachers in the schools did everything they could. They lay down on top of kids and many lives were saved because of the love and heroism of elementary school teachers. I know the teachers in our schools would do the same things. Every disaster protocol was followed to a “T,” yet a city is gone and dozens of people, many of them children, are dead. After a bombing, a massive tornado, massive wildfires, and now another massive tornado, my home state is in mourning and so am I. It is hard to be away from my family back in the Norman/Moore area right now although there’s not much if anything I could be doing there either.

Generally, the theological response to this type of disaster is usually to say, “We live in a fallen world and this is part of living in a fallen world. The world is the way it is because of sin. Sin infected everything.” This explanation is biblically based on Romans 8:22, but it is very cold comfort to those whose children are found dead under a pile of rubble. I struggle with this. No good explanation can be offered for why God allows natural disasters like these to occur. “God has His reasons and someday we’ll understand it,” we say. I hope so, but that doesn’t make life in the here and now any easier. Some people will say, “Times like these bring out the best in people.” Would you be saying that if you lost your third grader? Good does come out of disasters like these but I think it is a very hard case to make that the good outweighs the bad. I would much rather all those people be alive today than for people to have an opportunity to be friendly and helpful to each other. It seems like God could come up with a better way to bring out the good in people than to kill off a bunch of kids and destroy the lives of thousands and to keep doing it to the same area of the country again and again.

When I was in high school I used to love to play a computer game called “Sim City.” You would build a city from scratch and over time it would grow. You’d have to keep up with demands on utilities, education, health, entertainment and so on. I loved that game. Every now and then the game would “throw you a curveball” by sending an earthquake, a flood, or a tornado. Then your population number would drop and you’d have to rebuild. There wasn’t anything you could do about it. Tornados just happened, pretend people died, and you just kept on playing. I played like that for a long time. Then I found out that there was a special code you could punch in to turn off the disasters. After I turned off the disasters, I was able to build a wonderful prosperous city that lasted indefinitely. My question about real life is why doesn’t God “turn off” the disasters? I don’t know and that makes it tough for me during times like these. Why does this “natural evil” have to happen in the first place? It just seems cruel to me. I cannot answer this question.

Another thing that bothers me is when someone who survives the disaster is interviewed and they say, “The Lord was watching over us. The Lord saved us.” Now, I know what these good-natured folks are trying to convey. They are trying to be humble and faithful and to give thanks to God in all circumstances as we are supposed to. But they’re not thinking about what that sounds like to the people who lost loved ones. If you were spared by the tornado because the Lord was watching over you, then it follows that the seven little children, who died under the rubble when a pool of water that formed drowned them, all died because the Lord wasn’t watching over them. So a statement that is meant to be humble actually becomes a conceited and destructive statement. God chose to protect you but God did not choose to protect those helpless and terrified children. I also don’t think God chose to take the children either. God didn’t need them in heaven. I know that means that I’m not a very good Calvinist but it all seems so arbitrary to me—some survive and some don’t depending on where they were when the tornado hit. My kids are alive today for one reason—my kids weren’t in that elementary school. Other people’s kids are dead today because of one reason—their kids were in that elementary school. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Even that biblical truth seems quite arbitrary to me right now, even as I continue to bless the name of the Lord while I struggle.

I struggle and I doubt. But I keep believing anyway. I keep praying anyway. I keep hoping anyway. I keep looking for the good in the bad anyway. I keep loving God and loving other people anyway. I keep serving Christ’s church as a pastor anyway. This isn’t because I’m any stronger than anyone else. It might be because I am weaker than others. There just has to be something bigger and eternal that makes all this worthwhile, that gives it some kind of meaning. I keep doing all this because I don’t know what else to do. My job as a pastor is to help build up the faith of others. That’s difficult for me right now. I think that maybe I’m going to need others to help build up my faith for a while, at least until the news gets better from back home.

There are dozens more “Okies” in heaven today, which gives hope and comfort. But there are dozens fewer Okies in Oklahoma today, including several little Okies, and that makes me want to cry.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett

An Afternoon in Cincinnati

I spent a good part of this past Wednesday in downtown Cincinnati. The Hallidays had blessed me with tickets to the Reds game versus the Braves. I had asked for two of their four tickets and I called up our congregation's former youth pastor, Brian Mitchell, who has lived and worked in Cincinnati for the last six years or so. The plan was for us to meet outside the stadium and spend the afternoon at the ballpark together. I decided to head to Cincinnati a little earlier so I could visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center which sits just a block from the Great American Ball Park. I’d been wanting to visit the Freedom Center ever since we moved here. I knew I didn’t have much time (just an hour or so) but I wanted to make a quick run through of the museum to see if it was worth returning to for an entire day at a later time. Let me tell you, it is most certainly worth coming back to on another day! It took me an hour just to walk through all of the galleries and exhibits. Of course, I did not have any time to watch any of the numerous films that are shown in theaters throughout the building.

The most powerful experience for me, as I would assume is the case with most visitors, is when I stood inside an actual slave “pen” that had been recovered from Mason County, Kentucky. It is the size of a small barn. I walked inside the pen and saw the chains hanging from the rafters and I was transfixed by this nearly empty room where only 150 years ago or so human beings were chained up, beaten, whipped, raped, bought and sold. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and my chest was heavy. My eyes welled up and I felt the guilt of sin, the guilt of what human beings are willing to do to other human beings in the name of greed. As I walked through the various galleries, viewing artifacts and old photographs, it struck me that I was seeing evidence of one of the worst things humanity has ever done, one of the worst things my nation that I love had done to people. My beloved nation, whose founders wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," kept human beings in “pens” and it was totally legal. I plan to return to the Freedom Center as soon as I can to read every placard. For similar reasons I plan to visit the Museum of the American Indian and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum while I am in Washington D.C. this July.

In a huge shift in mood, I hurried out of the Freedom Center, grabbed a quick plate of healthy food (I’m actually enjoying eating healthy these days) at the Freedom Center Café, and headed over to the ball park. I met up with Brian and I realized that the Hallidays had given me all four tickets. I just couldn’t live with myself having two tickets for great seats just sitting in my pocket going unused. I enlisted Brian to help me find a dad and a kid. We searched the long ticket line and we both spotted a dad and his daughter. She was about nine years old or so and she had a backwards Reds cap on and a Reds jersey. I walked up to them, introduced myself to them and told them that I had two tickets for great seats that I was willing to give them. They couldn’t believe it. He tried to pay me something for them but that would have cheapened the whole thing. I told the dad, “They were given to me for free, so I’m giving them to you for free” (see Matthew 10:8). So, thanks to the Hallidays and their generosity this dad and daughter saved some money and had much better seats than they could have gotten! Brian and I enjoyed chatting with the grateful dad who had surprised his daughter by picking her up early from school to go see her beloved Reds.

It was a beautiful warm spring afternoon. A color guard from a local high school ROTC program presented the colors. A high school choir did a wonderful job singing the National Anthem. We all stood and cheered for a Vietnam War Veteran and then later again for a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. We ate peanuts and we saw a total of five home runs during the game. Unfortunately only two of them were by Reds and both were solo shots. The Braves hit a solo homer, a two-run homer, and a grand-slam. Obviously, the Reds didn’t win, but I’ve always believed that the worst day at the ball park beats the best day at work (although I do love my work!). At the end of the game the dad and daughter said thanks again and Brian and I parted ways. I hopped in the car and headed back toward home.

Wednesday was a day of contrasts. I viewed evidence of the African slave trade, which is the absolute worst that the United States of America has ever had to offer (along with the genocide and removal of Native peoples). I spent time thinking about how when those actions were taking place, our constitution was really a sham. You cannot say “all men [human beings] are created equal” out of one side of your mouth and with the other side support the buying, selling, and brutalization of human beings. Actions speak louder than words. On the other hand, I experienced a quintessentially American afternoon filled with much of the best things we have to offer—generosity, freedom, baseball, and a healthy and grateful patriotism. Wednesday afternoon is what everyone should be offered; Wednesday morning was what has been forced upon others sometimes instead (and continues to be forced on the 25 Million people who currently live in some form of slavery around the world today). What an interesting day!

In conclusion, while it is important to many of us to cheer on the Redlegs in hopes that they’ll start hitting better with runners in scoring position, it is much more important that we learn what the Freedom Center has to teach. Please consider going to Cincinnati to visit the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center if you haven’t. Actually, if there is anyone who would like to organize a group trip from our church please feel free to start working toward that. I think it would be not only a powerful experience for all of us who went but it would also be at least a small statement about the priorities of this congregation to gather together for a visit to such an important place and to see what can happen when we put our Christian faith into action on behalf of those in desperate need. If I asked someone to organize a trip to the Reds game, that would probably happen quickly. However, would you consider organizing a trip to the Freedom Center?

A Short Meditation on Spring

Last week someone said to me, "Everett, this is my 85th spring, and every single year it is still a surprise." I loved that! What a wonderful way to live life. Every year in April all the plants burst forth in colorful and fragrant blooms. Robins gather grass clippings for the nests they need to nurture their young. Gardeners turn over the soil yet again. "This will be the year of the bumper crop of veggies," they say, as they do every spring. Margaret Atwood once wrote, "In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” Every year we take this time to get back in touch with our natural, God-given, inclinations toward the feeling of bare feet on cool grass, soil under our fingernails, and fresh air filling our lungs. Every night I take my dog Eli for a walk. Last night as Eli and I were walking up Temple Street in the perfect 68 degree night beneath a canopy of distant stars and planets, I noticed something. The world smelled good. It was like the Earth had put on perfume for a big occasion. The trees, the flowers, the freshly cut grass filled my nostrils with the fragrance of life, of blessed existence. As I walked Eli (or he walked me), I breathed deeply of God's goodness in creation and I couldn't help but praise God. I put my earphones in and played the song "10,000 Reasons" by Matt Redman. Here are the lyrics:

Bless the Lord, O my soul
O my soul
Worship His holy name
Sing like never before
O my soul
I'll worship Your holy name

The sun comes up, it's a new day dawning
It's time to sing Your song again
Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me
Let me be singing when the evening comes

Bless the Lord, O my soul
O my soul
Worship His holy name
Sing like never before
O my soul
I'll worship Your holy name

You're rich in love, and You're slow to anger
Your name is great, and Your heart is kind
For all Your goodness I will keep on singing
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find

Bless the Lord, O my soul
O my soul
Worship His holy name
Sing like never before
O my soul
I'll worship Your holy name

And on that day when my strength is failing
The end draws near and my time has come
Still my soul will sing Your praise unending
Ten thousand years and then forevermore

Bless the Lord, O my soul
O my soul
Worship His holy name
Sing like never before
O my soul
I'll worship Your holy name

Jesus, I'll worship Your holy name
Lord, I'll worship Your holy name

Sing like never before
O my soul
I'll worship Your holy name
Jesus, I'll worship Your holy name
I'll worship Your holy name

What a glorious walk it was. God is good--all the time. All the time--God is good.

Friends, this is my 34th spring, and every single year it is still a surprise. What a wonderful way to live life. I hope this year you were surprised by it all over again. If you weren't, it's not too late.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett