For days, the world has watched the development of a Category 5 hurricane named Beryl travelling at 20 miles per hour through the warm Atlantic Ocean heading towards landfall with winds belting at more than 165 miles per hour, and a wave surge that would resemble a thousand tall skyscrapers tumbling down to earth. It is a terrifying storm, and one that has already brought much destruction and death in its pathway. What causes storms like Beryl is the subject of much consideration. Global warming has been identified as the most likely suspect. The fact is that storms like Beryl, with a force that up to 10 years ago used to be only the substance of fictional horror movies involving the weather (like a 2014 movie actualy called “Category 5”) are now both clear, present…and early. Beryl is the earliest Cateogry 5 hurricane on record.
In this continuing saga, what interested me was the words of Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness who spoke on his country’s preparedness for this seemingly unstoppable force. “We have prepared as much as we humanly can,” he said, “It is now in the hands of God.” What Holness stated reminded me of yet another statement reflected in James 4:13-15. Borrowing from the expression of Holness, the Bible cautions, “You can do whatever you can humanly imagine, but in the end, you are in the hands of God.” James concludes, “You ought to say, ‘If the Lord is willing, I will live and do this or the other.'” (James 4:15). My immediate prayer is for the people in the pathway of this terrible storm. But my continuing prayer is that the enduring lesson even after the months of cleanup that would certainly follow, and after the focus has moved onto some other newsworthy story is that we would recognize that humanity is but a vapor. Everything that we think makes us self-sufficient and self-important is evaporated at the sunrise. May we be reminded that nothing we do matters unless it is of eternal worth. May we be reminded that we are indeed “in the hands of God.”
Just Church
Through whatever storms we encounter, we need to be the church who follows Jesus. “The vision of Just Church is to establish a church in just the way Christ called the church to be – true to His Word, loving Him, loving one another, and loving the lost.”
