When It Rains, It Pours

The rain started last Thursday, which is somewhat disappointing for me because boasting a new set of frisbee golf frisbees, I was hoping to get out on the course and give them a whirl. It continued on Friday and Saturday (which changed my New Year's Eve plans) and Sunday and even Monday before the skies cleared. Someone mentioned to me that the amount of rain that had fallen in those consecutive days had not been matched for some fifty years in Visalia. Which is kind of fitting, seeing as how that was the last time that Visalia had been flooded, and turning on the news on Monday I was surprised to see that Visalia was once again flooding. Not only was it flooding, but it was flooding just a mile or two north of my house! I resisted the urge to go see the damage for myself and just let the news crews be my pair of eyes for the timebeing. Apparently, with all the construction going on just north of my house, there were lots of new houses, but there were not very many storm drains installed just yet. The result? Lots of brand new houses filled with two or three feet of water. After the fiasco was over with, many in my church congregation were attempting to find out if any of the other member's houses were involved in the flood, and the response from those members who lived in the area always seemed to be something to the effect of, "God was good to us, our house was spared." While I am certainly glad that their houses weren't flooded and that they seemed to be praising God for that, I couldn't help but think...what about all the people whose houses were flooded...was God not good to them? When they prayed to God that their houses would be saved from flooding, did God overlook them? Certainly God hadn't picked out some houses to be flooded and the other ones to be spared. What exactly had been God's action/intervention amidst the flooding?

In a hospital room are two patients, both are religious and both also have cancer. They both pray to God that He would intervene and heal, but only one of them recovers from the cancer...what was God's action in both of those patients' lives? Was He good to one and ignored the other?

If you pray that God will open up a parking spot at the front of the mall so that you do not have to walk so far and you find one just where you wanted it, did God answer that prayer?

Certainly, most of us would say that God does not grant us front row parking (it seems a bit absurd), but to what extent does God intervene in this world of ours? We know that He is the sustainer of life, if He did not will that life on earth go on, it certainly would not. So God is active today in the aspect of sustaining life, but does He answer personal prayer? James 5:16 says that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective," and Proverbs 15:29 says that God is "far from the wicked but He hears the prayer of the righteous." Apparently, there is something about the righteous that God likes to listen to them. Being righteous means not being self centered. Not having the things of self in mind, but the things of God. Being in tune with God. A righteous person would not pray for a parking spot, and perhaps a righteous person would not pray for a certain person to heal if they knew that the will of God was that that person's service to God on earth was finished (he would still pray for the patient, just not his healing). As for flooding houses and God's goodness...God is the one who defines goodness, any action of his is good, even an apparent inaction (in our eyes) would be good if God is the definition of good. If some of the people whose houses flooded were praying that their house would be spared and it wasn't, it was not a breach of God's goodness, but perhaps they have not seen God's good will in all of this just yet. Sometimes even the righteous can be wrong about God's plans...just ask Job.