One reason why the tsunami occurred is that we do not live in a magic world, but in a creation that has been given the gift of reliable and regular laws of nature by its Creator. The great fertility of life in all its forms depends on that gift. But it also has its inescapable shadow side. A world of evolving fruitfulness cannot help also being a world with malformations and ragged edges as part of it: like the fact that there are tectonic plates has enabled mineral resources to well up from within the Earth, replenishing over many millions of years the chemical richness of its surface. The raw material for endless generations of life became available in this way. Yet if there are tectonic plates, they will also occasionally slip, producing earthquakes and the huge ocean swells that accompany them. You cannot have one without the other. We all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation we would have kept all the nice things and discarded all the bad ones. The more we learn scientifically how the world works, the more clearly we see that this is just not possible, for fruitfulness and destructiveness, order and chaos, are inextricably intertwined.
The second thought is a specifically Christian insight into God's relationship to suffering. Our God is not just as compassionate spectator of events, looking down in pity from the safety of heaven, but we believe that, in the cross of Christ, God himself - living a human life in Jesus - has truly been a fellow-sharer of the anguish of the world. Where is God in the suffering of creation? The Christian answer is that God is a participant alongside us in the strangeness and bitterness of events. I believe that this insight meets the problem of suffering at the most profound level possible.
I hope that these thoughts may be of some use as we prayerfully wrestle with our perplexities about the devastation left by the tsunami.
