I thought I’d share this brief story from church yesterday. We worshiped at First Presbyterian, which is right down the road from us. One of our number, Leanna, is actually an intern there for the year and just started today. But the story in question happened during the children’s sermon.
So all the kids went up to the front of the church and gathered on the steps leading up to the pulpit and such like. The lady doing the sermon told the kids she was going to tell them a story and did: the story of Noah’s Ark and the flood that covered the Earth, killing everything except Noah and his family and the animals he kept. She got to the end, the bit about how God promised Noah that he would never do this to the Earth again and used it to illustrate how God loves us no matter what, whether we’re glad or sad or whatever. You know, children’s sermon stuff. But then she added this: “Now we had a big flood in our city, didn’t we? But that wasn’t God’s flood. That was a human error flood. God hasn’t broken His covenant with us.”
The storm and its aftermath is everywhere you look and in every conversation. I wasn’t here before the storm but it’s so apparent to me that the storm changed everybody and everything. The children’s sermon this Sunday inspired me and saddened me at the same time. Inspiring because people still have faith that God is going to answer their prayers and help them fix their city. Sad because so many folks turned their backs on this city and sometimes it has to feel like God did, too, I don’t know. I’ve noticed that there’s an interesting faith here, where one expects everything and nothing and yet maintains a good, or at least humorous, outlook. This is an interesting place.
