When Tragedy Strikes Quotes

No popularity exists when tragedy strikes. All that's left are human hearts and love and ache. We all love each other, deep down, and when we see another soul in pain we can't help but hurt too.

Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, people give up hope that they can expect anything more from life, when the real quest is finding out what life expects from them.

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet its inhabitants are strikingly unhappy. Accordingly, we present to the rest of mankind, on a planet rife with suffering and tragedy, the spectacle of a clown civilization. Sustained on a clown diet rich in sugar and fat, we have developed a clown physiognomy. We dress like clowns. We move about a landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities. We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns... Death, when we acknowledge it, is just another pratfall on the boob tube. Bang! You're dead!

But when tragedy strikes, it leaves no part of your life, of your being, untouched, unscathed, unscarred. ~Blood Like Poison: For the Love of a Vampire

Sometimes by holding onto what you love the most — you end up choking the very life from the thing you want to keep on living. It’s possible to try too hard, to love something so deeply that you lose yourself. The danger is never in loving someone — but losing your identity in the process. Because what happens when tragedy strikes? You’re left an empty shell. You’re left with nothing.

Some of us are born plain unlucky, helplessly watching others sail through. When tragedy strikes, those ‘lucky bastards’ won’t have a fucking clue what to do, paralyzed by fear.

As usual, when tragedy strikes, the powerless and disenfranchised are the ones who suffer most.

God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace.

When tragedy strikes, I must remember to breathe until I get to the fun part again.

God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws. The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God's part. Because the tragedy is not God's will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.

But when a god             strikes harm, a worse man often foils his better.

We spend so much time chasing the shallow things in life. But when tragedy strikes, or late at night when your brain asks too many questions, we know it’s the relationships that matter most. Whom can I trust? Does anyone really know me? Does anyone really care? If you think of your happiest moments, they will be about people. The most painful moments will too. Our relationships to others make or break our lives.

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love.

The old idea is that when tragedy strikes or when an obstacle blocks us, there are only two possibilities. We either become a smaller person or we become a bigger person. If it’s a real life change you cannot come out the same. So therefore, you’re either going to come out smaller or you are going to rise up and ultimately come out of it a bigger person.

People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light. They are prepared to go on breaking their backs plowing the same old field until the cows come home without seeing, until they stub their toes on it, that there is a treasure buried in that field rich enough to buy Texas. They are prepared for a God who strikes hard bargains but not for a God who gives as much for an hour’s work as for a day’s. They are prepared for a mustard-seed kingdom of God no bigger than the eye of a newt but not for the great banyan it becomes with birds in its branches singing Mozart. They are prepared for the potluck supper at First Presbyterian but not for the marriage supper of the Lamb, and when the bridegroom finally arrives at midnight with vine leaves in his hair, they turn up with their lamps to light him on his way all right only they have forgotten the oil to light them with and stand there with their big, bare, virginal feet glimmering faintly in the dark.

In the dramatic world of teenagers, they often create high profile ways to make themselves feel more important when tragedy strikes those amongst them. Teenagers are an example of narcissism at its finest.

We tend to make big changes only when tragedy strikes. We tend to look for alternative paths only when we feel we've hit rock bottom. We tend to ask existential questions about happiness only when we are at our most miserable.

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.

but when tragedy strikes, there’s a tendency to assume that someone is different. Special. That there’s something about them that makes them the kind of person bad things happen to. Because the alternative—that bad things can happen to anyone, at any time—is unthinkable. He

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

When disaster strikes, the poor almost always suffer far more than the rich, even if the rich caused the tragedy in the first place.

Truth is we are all tragedies waiting to happen; we just have to remember to have the rescue crew nearby when it strikes.

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless.

When we say that God is faithful, we don’t mean you’ll never experience suffering. A lot of people—in particular, Americans—misinterpret God’s faithfulness to mean some kind of promise to give us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So when tragedy strikes or the economy goes south or the child tests positive or we don’t find a spouse by thirty, we think God is unfaithful.

Everything good that we have comes from God—the rain, the sunshine, our health, our food, cute kittens, super-cute puppies, smiling babies, pure-white driven snow, deep-blue sea filled with tasty fish, cool water to drink, succulent fruit to eat, and fresh air to breathe: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (Jas. 1:17). However, instead of having a heartfelt thankfulness to God for all these undeserved blessings, this wicked world ignores God’s will, blasphemes His name, kills unborn children, fornicates, commits adultery, glorifies pornography, mocks the Word of God, promotes homosexuality, despises the gospel, and says that evolution gave us all the blessings of life. But the irony is that when tragedy strikes, they intuitively remember God and ask, “What have I done to deserve this?

The good news is we don't have to suffer alone. We don't have to carry the burdens of our messy lives alone. God is there for us. He wants to be the Comforter in Chief for the worst that life on this earth may hand us. but we need to know Him - genuinely know Him - not just when tragedy strikes. We need to know Him every moment of every day we live. We need to quit leaving it to the professionals and make know Him the most important mission of our lives.

Tragedy can strike without premonition. A natural disaster can arrive when the kids are playing with their Christmas presents. The narrative containers we use to impose structure and morality onto our lives no longer fit. Happy endings do not necessitate good deeds. Pain is immune to virtue.

The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now. Our friend Agnolo the Fat wrote: “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.” The essence of that account is of an epidemic destroying the very bonds of human society. When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell? And if parents abandoning children wasn’t destabilizing enough, other support elements in society were shattered by the justifiable fear of the pestilence. The natural human inclination to seek companionship and support from one’s neighbors was short-circuited. No one wanted to catch whatever was killing everybody. In an era when people congregating together was so much more important than it is in our modern, so-called connected world, people kept their distance from one another, creating one of the silent tragedies of this plague: that they had to suffer virtually alone.

When a misfortune strikes us, we can overcome it either by removing its cause or else by changing the effect it has on our feelings, that is, by reinterpreting the misfortune as good, whose benefit may only later become clear. Religion and art (as well as metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect a change in our feeling, in part by changing the way we judge experiences...and in part by awakening a pleasure in pain, in emotion generally...The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotization (as used, for example, for a toothache) is also enough for him in more serious suffering. The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decrease, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of the misfortune - of course, this is bad for the tragic poets (there being less and less material for the tragedy, because the realm of the inexorable, invincible fate grows ever smaller) but it is even worse for the priests (for until now they had fed on the narcotization of human misfortunes).

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

He stared at her in insolent silence, unable to believe the alluring, impulsive girl he remembered had become this coolly aloof, self-possessed young woman. Even with her dusty clothes and the smear of dirt on her cheek, Elizabeth Cameron was strikingly beautiful, but she’d changed so much that-except for the eyes-he scarcely recognized her. One thing hadn’t changed: She was still a schemer and a liar. Straightening abruptly from his stance in the doorway, Ian walked forward. “I’ve had enough of this charade, Miss Cameron. No one invited you here, and you damn well know it.” Blinded with wrath and humiliation, Elizabeth groped in her reticule and snatched out the handwritten letter her uncle had received inviting Elizabeth to join Ian there. Marching up to him, she slapped the invitation against his chest. Instinctively he caught it but didn’t open it. “Explain that,” she commanded, backing away and then waiting. “Another note, I’ll wager,” he drawled sarcastically, thinking of the night he’d gone to the greenhouse to meet her and recalling what a fool he’d been about her. Elizabeth stood beside the table, determined to have the satisfaction of hearing his explanation before she left-not that anything he said could make her stay. When he showed no sign of opening it, she turned furiously to Jake, who was sorely disappointed that Ian was deliberately chasing off two females who could surely be persuaded to do the cooking if they stayed. “Make him read it aloud!” she ordered the startled Jake. “Now, Ian,” Jake said, thinking of his empty stomach and the bleak future that lay ahead for it if the ladies went away, “why don’t you jes’ read that there little note, like the lady asked?” When Ian Thornton ignored the older man’s suggestion, Elizabeth lost control of her temper. Without thinking what she was actually doing, she reached out and snatched the pistol off the table, primed it, cocked it, and leveled it at Ian Thornton’s broad chest. “Read that note!” Jake, whose concern was still on his stomach, held up his hands as if the gun were pointed at him. “Ian, it could be a misunderstanding, you know, and it’s not nice to be rude to these ladies. Why don’t you read it, and then we’ll all sit down and have a nice”-he inclined his head meaningfully to the sack of provisions on the table-“supper.” “I don’t need to read it,” Ian snapped. “The last time I read a note from Lady Cameron I met her in a greenhouse and got shot in the arm for my trouble.” “Are you implying I invited you into that greenhouse?” Elizabeth scoffed furiously. With an impatient sigh Ian said, “Since you’re obviously determined to enact a Cheltenham tragedy, let’s get it over with before you’re on your way.” “Do you deny you sent me a note?” she snapped. “Of course I deny it!” “Then what were you doing in the greenhouse?” she shot back at him. “I came in response to that nearly illegible note you sent me,” he said in a bored, insulting drawl. “May I suggest that in future you devote less of your time to theatrics and some of it to improving your handwriting?” His gaze shifted to the pistol. “Put the gun down before you hurt yourself.

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

I love life … My son is the most precious to me. I will give up anything to be with my son at home where I belong … Life changes from good to bad … in a blink of an eye your whole life can change, so you should live life like it’s your last days on earth because you never know when tragedy might strike. … Some people don’t have a family to turn to in time of need ... I can’t wait for this nightmare to end so I can wake up and be me again.

My pastor has a saying that leads us all back to this point of surrender. Whenever we, as a staff, feel overwhelmed by the needs we can't meet, the complaints we can't soothe, or the people we can't appease, he reminds us, "There's a Lord for that." When the relationship fails, there's a Lord for that. When my child is unhappy at school, there's a Lord for that. When tragedy strikes, there's a Lord for that. When discouragement clouds, there's a Lord for that.

good news is we don’t have to suffer alone. We don’t have to carry the burdens of our messy lives alone. God is there for us. He wants to be the Comforter in Chief for the worst that life on this earth may hand us. But we need to know Him—genuinely know Him—not just when tragedy strikes. We need to know Him every moment of every day we live.

When disappointment or tragedy or suffering strikes, we have a decision to make: Will we turn away from God, or will we turn toward Him? Which road will we take? One road leads to doubt, anger, bitterness, fear, hopelessness, and despair. The other leads to hope, comfort, peace, strength, and joy.

Many of us rush around without much conscious knowledge of the pilgrimage God is carving out for us. When tragedy strikes, we’ve not learned the ways of God, so we have no frame of reference from which to respond. So, we slog through life, missing the divine touches.

When tragedy strikes, we should not respond by seeking personal revenge but rather let justice take its course and then let go. It is not easy to let go and empty our hearts of festering resentment. The Savior has offered to all of us a precious peace through His Atonement, but this can come only as we are willing to cast out negative feelings of anger, spite, or revenge. For all of us who forgive “those who trespass against us,” even those who have committed serious crimes, the Atonement brings a measure of peace and comfort.

After my father died, I learned that when tragedy strikes, you can either open up or shut down. My mother opened up and was not herself for some time. I shut down, and it worked for me. I shut down again on the day of September the eleventh.

Perhaps that works when the worst hour is the hour when tragedy strikes – a defining moment in time which is quickly over. But this is not like that. I thought my worst hour was when they took Ash and Millie, but however sick with worry I was, I still thought they would be back before the night was over. Then Becky called to say Millie and Ash may have been kidnapped and my previous worst hour seemed tame in comparison. Now I feel as if there is a huge weight crushing my chest, rising up in my throat, and with each hour that passes the weight becomes heavier, more unbearable, and the next hour of my life grows darker, bleaker than the last. And every time I close my eyes, I see Millie’s face, looking at me, begging me to help her. And there’s nothing I can do. I

Tragedy, it seems, hits softer when the numbers are greater. It's the lone face that strikes the deepest. You remember the one face. You never remember a thousand of them.

Like so many who rise to the occasion when tragedy strikes, the people in this narrative are unsung heroes--true 'small-town heroes'--those who toil endlessly, so often behind the scenes, to save life and limb. They ask for little, if any, recognition or reward, but they and all who know them remain forever changed by their bravery and selflessness. They don't expect honor or laud, but at some point, the time must come for their story to be told. This is their story. This is their time.

When tragedy strikes, everyone at once becomes a psychoanalyst, thinking they understand the world and themselves, but if they indeed did, they would see we are all the cause of such calamities. You can pass all the legislation you want, but in the end, our society is failing because we have failed. We have failed "leadership", failed society and families. We have, in fact, failed to look within. Perhaps if we lived in tribes of our choosing things would be better; maybe we shouldn't be here at all.

Evil wants to rob the world of truth and light. When tragedy strikes evil swoops in to cause chaos and darkness. We are not guaranteed a life void of pain, but we are offered a future filled with promise and hope in His name.

Now in her early forties, Deb was of an age when tragedy was striking her friends: rapidly moving cancer, the slow death of parents. But not violence. It felt like the worst kind of horror, one that Deb thought she’d been spared.

And handsome Zorawar! No one feature made him so striking, though his eyes came close. From them came a passion, an honesty, a gentleness. He was handsome from the depth of his eyes to the tender expression of his voice. He was fetching from his generous opinions to the touch of his hand. His voice quickened when he sparkled with a new idea or when he was so enjoying one of Ayesha’s that he lost himself for a moment and quite forgot the mask he wore for others.

The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After School Specials, and CBS called their version Schoolbreak. NBC went with Special Treat, which, given the content of these shows, strikes me now as darkly comic. I rarely managed to watch one of these programs in its entirety because I wasn’t allowed to turn on the television during homework time, but occasionally I’d sneak a half hour. They ranged from mild domestic drama, like “Divorced Kids’ Blues,” to more sensational stories, such as “Are You My Mother?,” in which a girl finds out the mom she thought was dead is actually alive and in some kind of institution. Then there were episodes like these: “One Too Many”—one of several specials about drunk-driving accidents. “Don’t Touch”—a variation on the theme that abuse can come at you from any direction: a sitter, a parent, an uncle, a family friend… (See also, and I swear I’m not making this up: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.”) “Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy”—What happened to Andrea when she accepted a ride from a stranger? Well, it wasn’t good at all, I can tell you that. “A Very Delicate Matter”—Guess what? The matter is gonorrhea. “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend”—Answer: as soon as you notice their interest in cocaine.

Why did they say that? Why did they assume that they were somehow responsible for this tragedy? Who taught them to believe in a God who would strike down an attractive, gifted young woman without warning as punishment for someone else’s ritual infraction?

I don't easily give up these moments of grace and joy. At fifty-one, I've experienced enough to know that when tragedy strikes, these moments evaporate with breathtaking speed in the bitter cold of loss, and I'm left grasping for them, my wounded spirit parched.

I often think life is just a performance. None of this is real. It’s a pretense at reality, that’s all. Only when someone, or something, we love dies, do we wake up from the play—and see how artificial it all is—this constructed reality we inhabit. We suddenly realize that life is in no way lasting, or permanent; no future exists—and nothing we do matters. And in desolation, we howl and scream and rail at the heavens, until, at some point, we do the inevitable: we eat, dress, and brush our teeth. We continue with the marionette-like motions of life, however unhinged it feels to do so. Then, ever so slowly, the illusion takes over again—until we forget that we are actors in a play. Until the next tragedy strikes—to wake us up.

When our past meets our present it can either guide us or control us. So remember, even if tragedy strikes not everything is a tragedy. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to find peace, and that peace is worth everything.

Certainly prevents some believers from being compassionate, sympathetic, or even tolerant of others who are not as certain in their faith. Their arrogance turns them into the "frozen chosen," consciously or unconsciously excluding others from their cozy, believing world. This is the crabbed, joyless, and ungenerous religiosity that Jesus spoke against: spiritual blindness. There is a more subtle danger for this group: a complacency that makes one's relationship with God stagnate. Some people cling to ways of understanding their faith learned in childhood that might not work for an adult. For example, you might cling to a childhood notion of a God who will never let anything bad happen. When tragedy strikes, since your youthful image of God is not reflected in reality, you may abandon the God of your youth. Or you may abandon God completely. An adult life requires an adult faith. Think of it this way: you wouldn't consider yourself equipped to face life with a third-grader's understanding of math. Yet people often expect the religious instruction they had in grammar school to sustain them in the adult world. In his book A Friendship Like No Other, the Jesuit spiritual writer William A. Barry invites adults to relate to God in an adult way. Just as an adult child needs to relate to his or her parent in a new way, he suggest, so adult believers need to relate t God in new ways as they mature. Otherwise, one remains stuck in a childlike view of God that prevents fully embracing a mature faith.

Don’t be afraid, sweetheart. Just believe. Believe in love.” She smiled crookedly. “If you have fireworks set to go off, I’m going to think something’s really fishy.” He took a risk. “I think we have to wait at least four weeks after the babies are born for the fireworks. At least, that’s what they said in my childbirth class.” She gave a little smile that broke his heart but at the same time gave him hope, so he persisted. “When I came to Eternity Springs, I’d lost my ability to believe in anything but pain. This place healed me. You healed me. Your love healed me.” Her lips pouted, and with a touch of petulance in her voice she replied, “I never told you I loved you.” Not gonna make it easy for me, are you? But he had won. He could see it in her eyes, the subtle softening of her body. He kissed her hands, gently nipped her skin, and said, “Then tell me now.” She wrinkled her nose and kept her mouth stubbornly silent. “I love you, Nicole,” he repeated. “You are my heart, my soul, my world. You and Eternity Springs have taught me an invaluable lesson. Even if tragedy strikes my life again and God takes you away from me, as horrible as that would be, I know that I’d survive it. Love can hurt, but if you’ll let it, love also can heal. It truly is a miraculous medicine. You believe that, too, don’t you?” When she nodded, her eyes now swimming in tears, he said, “That’s why I know that eventually you’ll forgive me. Love heals. Now, my love, you say it. Tell me you love me.” She reached out, grasped the silver medal that hung around his neck, and rubbed her thumb over the angel’s wings. Then she released the medal and tenderly touched his cheek. “I do love you, John Gabriel Callahan. I forgive you. Just don’t do anything so stupid again, okay?

Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church, on a hill between Waterloo and Cedar Falls, took their place in the pews, and listened to the minister. But there seemed to be no fire or passion, no sense of what was really happening in the world. They’d tried other churches and found congregations interested in what God had done 2,000 years ago, but no one paying attention to what God was doing right then. Certainly, churches weren’t addressing the crime in Cedar Falls, the drugs, or the sorry state of schools and government, not to mention the kind of danger that Hal Lindsey described. They would have to find the truth themselves. They began doing their own research, especially Vicki. She had quit work to raise Sara, and later Samuel, who was born in April 1978. When Sara started school, Randy and Vicki couldn’t believe the pagan things she was being taught. They refused to allow her to dress up for Halloween—Satan’s holiday—and decided they had to teach Sara at home. But that was illegal in Iowa. A booster shot of religion came with cable television and The PTL Club, the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell. The small television in the kitchen was on all the time for a while, but most of Vicki’s free time was spent reading. She’s lose herself in the Cedar Falls public library, reading the science fiction her dad had introduced her to as a kid, the novels and self-help books friends recommended, biblical histories, political tracts, and obscure books that she discovered on her own. Like a painter, she pulled out colors and hues that fit with the philosophy she and Randy were discovering, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be something guiding them toward “the truth,” and, at the same time, pulling them closer together. She spent hours in the library, and when she found something that fit, she passed it along first to Randy, who might read the book himself and then spread it to everyone—the people at work, in the neighborhood, at the coffee shop where he hung out. They read books from fringe organizations and groups, picking through the philosophies, taking what they agreed with and discarding the rest. Yet some of the books that influenced them came from the mainstream, such as Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Vicki found its struggle between the individual and the state prophetic and its action inspiring. The book shows a government so overbearing and immoral that creative people, led by a self-reliant protagonist, go on strike and move to the mountains. “‘You will win,’” the book’s protagonist cries from his mountain hideout, “‘when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.

To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t come that way now. So when Vicki decided her family would follow Old Testament law and stop eating unclean meat like pork and oysters (“The Lord says, ‘Don’t eat it’—He knows it’s got trichonomas and isn’t good for your body,” Vicki wrote to a friend), no one in the group thought she’d come about the decision from anywhere but Scripture and His divine will. There would be anywhere from four to ten people at the Weavers’ house, sometimes as often as four nights a week. Randy led the Bible study most of the time, but everyone read chapters and commented on what they might mean. Vicki was clearly the scripturalist and scholar of the group. It was as if she had memorized the whole thing, from Genesis to Revelation, Acts to Zechariah. They read only the King James Version of the Bible, because Vicki said other translations weren’t divinely inspired and were pagan-influenced. By 1981, the Old Testament books were opening up for Randy and Vicki, not as outdated stories, but as the never-ending law of the Maker. He was opening their eyes to what was happening now, in the United States, just as Hal Lindsey had foretold. The forces of evil (the Soviet Union, the U.S. government, Jewish bankers) were ready to strike at any time against American people. From Ezekiel, they read: “Son of man [Christian Americans], set thy face against Gog [the grand conspiracy] … “Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company [their Bible study group] that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword [somewhere in the American West], and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains [the Rockies] of Israel [the United States], which have been always waste [the desolate mountains of Montana? Colorado?

No, not words but the action speaks to our community's needs. Help when tragedy strikes.

Answer the urgent call. Help when tragedy strikes. And do it for free.

It is our American tradition to come together in times of tragedy. This is how we grow as a people and as a nation.

They offered food to Olive and Mary Ann, who both refused. When they refused, the Yavapais laughed at them and taunted them, only adding insult to the pain the surviving Oatman girls were already feeling. The Yavapais were relishing in Olive’s grief. Mary Ann buried her head in Olive’s side, crying, incredulous as to what was happening. The Yavapais quieted her down by holding a club over her head as if they would strike her if she did not stop crying. It is hard to imagine what Olive must have been feeling at that moment.

I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason. . . . The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God’s part. Because the tragedy is not God’s will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.21

There are few things in this world that truly make us content. There’s a difference between happy and content, did ya know?" I shook my head, having never given the idea much thought. "Happy is what you are when you buy yourself a new hat, when you look on something grand for the first time, when a lad surprises his girl with roses. But content is different entirely. A content person feels that all is right with the world even when tragedy strikes, even when loss weighs the spirit down. They’re still at ease within themselves no matter what calamity breaks their heart. Do you see? " I did. I nodded, though I wasn’t quite sure where all this was going. "Just so, a person can be depressed or sad. The depressed person feels the blow of some misfortune---loss of a job, a pet dies, a car accident. With time depression goes away. But the sad one..." He shakes his head leveling his gaze on me. "The sad one allows misfortune to darken the spirit, to smother any hope left inside. The sad one doesn’t live long." "What do you mean? You can’t die from sadness." "Even if the body’s breathin’, that don’t mean you’re livin’, lass.

There are so many things that can take you out of this life (accidents, illness, unforeseen tragedies, cruelty of time, etc) , don't take yourself out of it. In life, so many things are beyond our control—fate, chance, and time. These forces can strike without warning. But the choice to keep living, to keep fighting, is yours alone. Don’t take that choice away. Your life is worth holding onto, even when it feels like everything is against you. Life can be cruel, the world can be unforgiving. So, don't let despair drive you to take yourself out of the game. Life is fragile, and there are countless things that can end it prematurely, let it not be you...

An unusually clear statement of the secular view of evil and suffering is made by Richard Dawkins in his book "River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life"- He writes: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation....In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” This is a complete departure from every other cultural view of suffering. Each one sees evil as having some purpose as a punishment, or a test, or an opportunity. But in Dawkin's view, the reason people struggle so mightily in the face of suffering is because they will not accept that it never has any purpose. It is senseless, neither bad nor good- because categories such as good and evil are meaningless in the universe we live in. "We humans have purpose on the brain," he argues. "Show us almost any object or process and it is hard for us to resist the 'Why' question...It is an almost universal delusion...The old temptation comes back with a vengeance when tragedy strikes..."Why oh why, did the cancer/earthquake/hurricane have to strike my child?" But he argues that this agony happens because "we cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking purpose....DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

When disappointment or tragedy or suffering strikes, we have a decision to make: Will we turn away from God, or will we turn toward Him? Which road will we take? One road leads to doubt, anger, bitterness, fear, hopelessness and despair. The other leads to hope, comfort, peace, strength and joy.

When solar radiation strikes ionosphere, earth produces the northern lights. When suffering strikes psychosphere, mind produces heart light.