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"God promised that He would never make a flood over the world again," she said. "How can it be happening if God said it wouldn't?"
The question became a "teachable moment", not so much about theology as geography. Television images from helicopters showed an advancing "Red Sea" from horizon to horizon; but when placed on a map of Manitoba and then a map of the world, the flood was local, not global.
The flood has become a series of metaphors of our lives.
When we become engulfed by the world around us, it can become our whole reality. Our crisis, or our victory, is all that matters. Our flood seems a universal flood.
When we lived in Bangladesh, our attention focussed on the relentlessly enveloping annual monsoon flooding; each year, 30% or more of the nation was immersed for several weeks by the deluge from the sky and the torrents pouring down the rivers from the Himalayas. In southern Ontario, we shuddered with fear at the news of early summer hail that bruised and pierced the fruit. In the US midwest, people huddle helplessly in basements while tornados shatter buildings into splinters.
As people survey the damage when the fury has passed, as they walk through filthy, muddied homes, as they wander through rows of stripped and beaten trees, as they clamber over twisted walls and fragments of familiar shapes, and as they contemplate the cost, they nearly always say what hundreds of people have said in this year's Manitoba flood: "Thank God, no one was hurt. Things can be replaced, but you can't replace people."
People have wept many tears for the houses that are their homes, for the rooms that they decorated, the furniture that they chose, the patio that they built, the stereo that they saved for. The loss of these things is personal. But when they have to leave quickly, they take along the family pictures and not the television, the teddy bear that Grandma made and not the microwave, letters from a distant daughter and not the gilded vase.
We spend so much time and energy accumulating things--beautiful, useful, valuable things. Then, in a moment of crisis, we make choices about what to take and what to leave, and our choices turn out to be remarkably similar around the world. First, we choose human life. Next, we choose those things that are symbols of our deepest relationships. Last we choose material things based purely on their material value.
These choices express our fundamental spiritual character. They remind us of Jesus, who challenged us to set our priorities on what is eternal.
These choices are reflected in the thousands of volunteers and the abundance of goodwill and generosity that were evident throughout Manitoba in response to the flood. In the sandbagging lines, high school students worked beside grandparents; people visiting from England borrowed boots and working gloves and pitched in; pickup trucks full of food and drinks arrived unexpectedly from across the city; homes and schools opened their doors in welcome to strangers whose search for refuge became a common bond of friendship.
It may seem that all of these people were merely protecting material things from damage and destruction. But I sensed that they were doing much more. They were working together to create an ark, an island of safety, a diked community. Their overriding concern was to include as many people as possible in this ark.
The image of the ark has often been used in the history of the church as a symbol of God's chosen people, safely rescued from the raging waters of death. The ark became a symbol of triumph and preferential treatment more than a reminder of the grace of God. There was little anguish for those lost in the watery grave outside. That ark never had doors that could open and let others in.
Imagine the ark with Jesus in it. Where would He be? At an open door, bailing water, reaching out a strong rescuing hand, jumping into the turbulence to pull someone nearer, even drowning as He gives his life for an ordinary person who seemed too far away to be helped and whom the rest of us had given up on.
Looking across the swollen, massive Red River from the dry side of a dike, someone paused to rest weary muscles and commented that we could probably solve many of our most intractable social problems if we would attack them with the energy, shared commitment and self-sacrifice of this battle against the flood. True.
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