One of the worst tornado outbreaks in history ravaged several states, including Arkansas, earlier this month.
Here in Kentucky, Mayfield looks like it was hit by a nuclear bomb. Across 10 Kentucky counties, at least 76 people were killed.
Those lost include an infant whose parents desperately strapped her in a car seat as the winds bore down, praying the plastic encasement might save her. It didn't.
Tragic, freakish anecdotes abound. There seems to be no logic or justice to any of it.
Inevitably, we return at times such as this to the questions that haunted Job millennia ago: Where was God in this storm? Did God angrily send it as retribution for human sins? Was God not angry, but instead powerless to stop the carnage? If God is both merciful and indeed powerful enough to stop tornadoes, then why didn't he intervene?
Let me cut to the chase. Nobody knows the answers. I don't. You don't. Even the people who claim to know are only whistling through the graveyard.
Suffering is and always has been a mystery. That's the theme of the book of Job, which some scholars say is the oldest book in the Bible. Job weeps, howls and shakes his fist at God, demanding answers, until God finally responds.
God's answer: no, you don't know why you suffer and I'm not going to tell you. I'm God and you're not, and you wouldn't understand anyway, so an explanation would be a waste of breath.
(Thanks, Lord, but might I say that's not a terribly helpful response?)
Thousands of years and countless brilliant philosophers later, that's where we remain. We still don't understand.
Tragedy and suffering befall everybody. I don't mean to minimize the apocalyptic destruction of this recent storm, but people endure private apocalypses every day.
I've got a friend who has battled cancer for years and just got a bleak prognosis. She and her husband are raising two grandchildren. Another friend recently discovered he has inoperable esophageal cancer.
While I was sitting at my desk writing this column, I was interrupted by a call saying yet another longtime friend died unexpectedly this morning. I left to be with her family as her body was removed from her house.
Always, somebody is facing their own EF-5 tornado. Sooner or later a storm will crash into me, too, and into you. Tragedy comes for us all. Forget the bromides and platitudes. Forget the penny-ante philosophizing. Even in our comparatively safe, insulated 21st century, the land is full of troubles, and that's that.
What faith offers us isn't a grand, all-encompassing explanation, but something hopeful nonetheless. Faith says God cares deeply about us no matter what mess we're in, and that he's promised to stay with us until the end.
Christianity, the faith I practice, never suggested its adherents might get a free pass from pain. Right from the get-go, Jesus promised, "In this world you will have tribulation."
And it's always struck me that St. Paul described his ministry as a catalog of trials:
"Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent adrift at sea. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers; I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches."
But, despite all that, he'd found God's grace sufficient for every woe, he said. Faith gave him peace when he was suffering and the ability to find goodness although beset by evil.
Maybe that's where God shows up strongest in bad times -- in the tender, battered refusal to surrender to despair or bitterness. God's the one who tells us there's hope yet. He's the one who whispers, "Yes, a terrible thing has happened. Now, go do something kind for somebody. Ease their journey."
I'm not the authority, but I imagine God is present in ravaged Western Kentucky.
He was moving in those first responders who worked all night digging the living and the dead out of a collapsed candle factory. He was revealing himself through our governor and first lady as they cried for the victims.
He was among the congregation that opened its doors to house strangers who'd lost their homes. He was with that guy who drove a food truck into the wreckage and served hot, free meals to anybody who looked hungry.
An acquaintance said in an email he saw a news clip on NBC. Worshippers were sitting together in the cold, inside the hull of a church smashed to splinters by a tornado. They were singing Christmas carols.
I like to believe the Lord was there, too, singing harmony with them, warming them with love and solace even as they ached from the cold mystery of suffering and loss.
Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling, Ky. You can email him at
pratpd@yahoo.com