Faith Mustn't Ebb in Tsunami's Wake

The Boston Herald

The waves are gentle, the ocean in the background wide and calm. Reporters stand on the sand with their back to the water. You'd envy them normally. Snow here. Sun there.

Nobody says, ``This is exactly how it was 12 days ago.'' Light dancing on the water. Waves lapping the shore. Nobody has to. We know. 

The camera turns to the shore and all normal is gone. In the early days of this tragedy, television tried to make this world disaster all about America. Could it happen here, CNN asked multiple experts. One after another they said no, not likely. Until finally one said yes, indeed.

This was the mindset of the media before they started seeing firsthand what the ocean had done. If it didn't happen here, it didn't count. 

It counts now.

Hotels. Huts. Boats. Cities. All are rubble. Only the temples remain standing. Reporters at first speculated that they were better built than other buildings. But locals have said they were not.The temples survived. So did the animals. And primative tribesmen on tiny islands in the Indian Ocean.

Why?

A man from Norway, Anders Ericcson, lost his 2 1/2-year-old son. ``Daddy, I'm scared. Please help,'' were the child's last words. He was wearing floaties. You can't see 150,000 deaths. But one? You wish you could stop seeing it.

CNN's Aaron Brown reported Wednesday about a man from New Hampshire, a financial consultant trained as a paramedic, who quickly and quietly reacted to the plight of people he didn't know and flew to Jakarta to help.

“It started as just kind of a thought at night on the Internet with the kids asleep and the plan just literally fell into place,'' he told Brown. And then he hemmed and hawed a little. ``The candid answer without trying to jam my religion down anybody is, you know, it's really, for me personally it's really - it's really walking the walk.

“You see a lot of athletes and a lot of people with, `What Would Jesus Do?' bracelets around and I've worn one for a long while and I'm not trying to sound like anything funny but literally that's how it kind of unfolded.''

He is working in a tent where everyone is an amputee.

“These are people that despite unbelievable personal injuries and unbelievable conditions and nothing to go back to have decided to live. This is the epitome of the human spirit.''

Brown had a hard time reporting this. He got choked up. He turned from the camera, the ocean behind him, contained and beautiful and benign.

And you wonder about the ocean sustaining life and then taking it. And Jesus. Where was He, temples left standing and animals saved, but babies pulled out of their parents' arms?

And you wonder about faith, where it comes from and how it is stronger than death, human beings, like the ocean itself, far deeper and more powerful than we know.