Visitors to Pompeii catch...
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Visitors to Pompeii catch a sense of the great loss that came suddenly upon it at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. So also we can stand helpless before the reruns, on television, of incidents like the explosion of the first atomic bomb, or the explosion of the spacecraft "Challenger." We can watch for the second, third, tenth time the moving scenes of a Mexico City falling down in an earthquake. We can observe the anniversary of the Colombian disaster by watching the rivers of lava rush through the valleys to devour homes and people.
We can stand together at the edge of these valleys of loss, or walk together through them, and know that something has gone terribly wrong! But among all the debris that comes floating by, there is always something to grasp that is worth keeping. For the Christian, this is the confident reliance on a good and gracious God who walks every valley with us! He walks with us in our personal or national loss, and even when it seems the earth itself has turned against us. Saint Paul says it so well: "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38, 39)
-- Donald Zelle in Wind Through the Valleys, CSS No. 7862 (1987).
