Genesis 7 :: the waters rise

i know that on days of tragedy we are often struck dumb by the sheer terror of the moment. i wasn’t alive for the kennedy assassinations, but remember sitting in my classroom as a child and watching the challenger explosion live on tv…you could sense the weight of the moment even as a child. no one said anything, and in a room full of kids that’s telling. we all understood what happened. if i could go back into that room, i could show you where the tv was sitting and where my desk was because the moment is seared into my mind.

i remember september 11th walking into mike music’s classroom to look at the cnn website because someone had flown a plane into the first wtc building. we just thought it was pilot error, and we didn’t have any idea what size plane it was at first. but as the morning went on and the second plane hit and the third and the crash of the fourth things just kind of seized up. class couldn’t go on because everyone had mentally and emotionally checked out. the scope of what was going on was beyond comprehension at the moment, and we didn’t know what was going to happen next. we had kids at the school whose dads were pilots heading to new york that morning…we had to be sensitive to how much we said, and we had to turn off our monitors during class time.

noah wakes up on the 17 day of the second month of his six-hundredth year not knowing just how things were going to happen, but aware that today was going to be massively significant. his neighbors would be gone, dead, drowned. his family, those who did not believe, and the families of his wife and daughters-in-law would all meet the same end. terrified, pleading too late for them to open the door. their depravity and pride and selfishness having done them in before the water even came. the water was just the vehicle for their physical demise. their hearts were already gone. so for a week or two people ran to higher and higher ground. but the wild animals were doing the same. people and animals would have fought for the remaining land space. hopefully most people were taken out in the initial surges of water, but we just don’t know. thankfully there were no permanently open windows on the ark facing out, and the walls were thick, blocking most sounds.  but noah and his family knew full well what was going on outside. and i’m sure they sat in silence, weeping. their trauma was undoubtedly going on as well, hearts breaking for the lost friends and family who hadn’t listened to God’s call on their lives.

Noah never offers a word on his feelings. probably because there is no good way to express the thoughts of a weeping heart.  so why should we wait until it is too late to tell our friends and family around us today? why linger in our selfish ego shelters?

the world cannot afford our silence much longer.

we try to comfort ourselves through rationalization and we pat our backs thinking about how good we are, and that we have shown that goodness to others. but have we told them what our motives are for this lifestyle? do they know why we do what we do, or do we just leave it up to them to ask and figure things out on their own? what’s your reason for silence? the horror of speaking up outweighs the need for the salvation of another’s soul?