My home and several of my businesses narrowly escaped devastation a few nights ago when an EF-1 tornado made its way through our property. The event was especially poignant given that we had just finished a two-and-a-half month construction repair to our corporate office due to a flood on New Year’s Day. It has been an interesting year so far, to say the least!

It intrigues me that people call such events “Acts of God,” as saying so reveals a great deal about how they feel and relate to their Maker. Most who believe in God would say that He has a loving nature, yet the same people don’t think twice about attributing terribly destructive acts to Him. Even the Bible is riddled with such juxtapositions of His dual nature, describing Him as both loving and vengeful. Could God really be both or is such a view just an elaborate construct of a shameful heart and a self-justifying mind?

Part of the confusion on this topic might come from the fact that man has typically fashioned a God in his own likeness rather than allowing for the possibility of the converse. Moreover, the chronic misuse of free will may have divorced man from his true creative nature. If both of these statements are true, then it is possible that man, who has imposed his own narrow, self-centered will upon the world he was meant to steward, hesitates little when things go badly to finger God as the culprit and to rationalize his actions up to that point.

The atheist will claim that such events are random occurrences, or possibly the natural result of a causal chain. He would deny any possibility of a divine strategy or of man playing a part in the actualization of that strategy. He would likewise consider it preposterous, if not heretical to the God he doesn’t believe in, that man’s actions could either precipitate or obviate the need for natural disasters. It’s a fascinating topic, really!

Many of the tragedies and “miraculous” near-misses we experience in life are anthropogenic. There is often a clear chain of cause that links human action to a turn of events, one way or another: air pollution in a city filled with cars or smokestacks, hundreds of lives saved by a heroic landing in the Potomac and so on. But in many cases the causal chain is not so easy to follow. Given the number of people in the world and given the remarkable complexity of matter itself, it is often hard to see what caused what. Yet everything is caused by something else, even, I would venture to say, the supposedly random movement of subatomic particles.

You are not always part of the causal chain for the good things or the bad that occur in your world, but you are wise to handle all matters within your field of responsibility as if you were. Should your home be hit by a tornado or should you be the victim of some random illness, there is no harm in moving forward in a way that permits you to handle the details of your living more carefully.

For me right now that means: 1) sharpening the chain on my chainsaw to remove the trees, which for some unexplained reason fell on both sides of two of my buildings rather than straight through them and 2) working up a list of repairs that need to be done to restore the buildings and property to the status quo ante. I suspect as with most upsets of this type there may even be the opportunity to improve upon what was there previously.

There is no point in crying “Why me!?!” or in seeking to blame another for your misfortunes. Seek instead to use such matters as a means of rising up to a newer, stronger you. In other words, don’t let the bastards wear you down!

For those of you who are curious, here is a picture of the path of the tornado…it travelled across the field at the top of the picture, jumped the road and then moved through the back of our property. We lost a number of healthy oaks, maples and ornamental trees. The building was largely spared, though a window in the back corner was sucked out, an interior door frame was pulled out of the wall and an exterior metal door was pulled out and the frame bent. The white speck in the bottom field is a metal lawn chair that was thrown from the pool area:

Notice the trees on both sides of the green-roofed building, our corporate office in the photo below. The 80′ tall oak trees fell 10′ from the buildings on both sides. About as close a call as you could imagine:

Some of the trees behind the building:

Metal deck chairs were mangled and stuck in a willow tree:

A willow tree pulled right out of the ground: