The terrible news coming out of Haiti these past two days got this transplanted Californian thinking.  Perhaps growing up on top of a major faultline makes it easy to ignore it.  Having moved in more recently I've been thinking, "When will our turn come?"

When it does, I hope we will find the world responding with more compassion and help than Pat Robertson did today on CBN's The 700 club.  He took the opportunity to point out that this earthquate was punishment for the Haitain people making a "pact with the devil" in order to get rid of French Colonial rule a couple of hundred years ago.

I have no idea on the veracity of the facts he's siting, but I'm pretty clear on the problem with trying to assign blame for a horrific tragedy at the very moment that people are still trapped in the rubble.  Now is not the time for pointing fingers and making pious claims to understand the mind of God.  Now is the time for action!  There will be time enough later to satisfy our need for understanding.

I'm so thankful that my church family has been spending their time rather more productively than blaming the victims for their own suffering.  ADRA, a part of our ministry network, has people on the ground right now handing out food, blankets, and basic necessities to those in need.  If you want to help, click here.  You can contribute online directly to the needs at hand.

Unfortunately, when Christians start trying to draw direct lines between natural disasters and the sinfulness of the victims they sound callous, insensitive, and not very much like Jesus.  In fact, Jesus, when faced with the same opportunity, pointed out strongly that its a terrible mistake to decide who is more sinful based on who lives or dies when something terrible happens.  In Luke 13, he referenced two different local tragedies of his day and categorically denied that the survivors were more righteous than the victims.  Just read the book of Ecclesiastes and you'll get a very clear, if somewhat depressing, picture that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people sometimes. 

So if, or more likely, when its our turn in Southern California to find ourselves digging out from the rubble and trying to find our footing, how will we want the world responding to our time of need.  I for one hope all people will be more concerned about the Golden Rule than about lecturing us on the wickedness of our land.