It's Haiti on Line One, God. They Say It's Urgent.

(Aired on January 14, 2010)

This is the most difficult time to believe in God.

Some people believe in a supreme being who pulls the strings of human experience like the manipulator of a marionette.  Everything that happens is under God's control; is God's will.  For these people, understanding events like this week's in Haiti is next to impossible, because you can't blame them on the existence of evil.  (Unless of course you are a moron like Pat Robertson.)  It was nature - the world God supposedly created.

My ever-evolving understanding of the divine is a little different.  More like someone who built a house and then essentially turned over the keys to us.  That doesn't make natural disasters much easier to understand, frankly.  The house is booby trapped.

Some people don't believe in a loving supreme being at all, and while the earthquake is strong circumstantial evidence, I'm sure that crowd doesn't feel any better about the world right now.

If a benevolent God exists, His hand wasn't in this.  What Haiti experienced Tuesday was the unveiling of another circle of hell, a deeper, more unimaginable degree of suffering in a country whose people already suffer every day.  In addition to the tens of thousands who died on Tuesday, scores more will die in the coming weeks and months.  The country simply has neither the resources nor the infrastructure to save them.  But its in these weeks and months, as the compassionate response pours in from around the world, that we will find out where God really is.

If not, may God - or someone else - help us.