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“After the flood, all the colors came out…”
-Bono, U2, “Beautiful Day”

As I write this, thousands of people in New Orleans and the surrounding areas are struggling to survive. Millions are wondering when they’ll even have a city to come home to. I watched the news last night in disbelief. The Superdome looks like a shell and the French Quarter is floating with debris. These are national landmarks and it shocks us as a country to see them changed by chance.

The thing that struck me the most about the scene was not the floating cars or the hundreds of emergency vehicles waiting at the ready, though. It was one quick shot of a family stranded on their porch signaling to the media helicopter with a flashlight. The father was flashing an SOS signal with one hand and holding a child in the other. The water was up to their knees and was rising.

These are people just like you and me. They own businesses and attend PTO meetings. They saved up for sofas and new cars. They cherish their photo albums and family heirlooms. Only they have just lost everything. Their homes are ruined, their water contaminated, and their “normal” has forever been changed all by one turn of a storm. One of these people is my brother Michael. He lives in Gulfport, Mississippi. He and his girlfriend and her baby evacuated in time, thank God, but their home is probably a pile of toothpicks this morning. He is 21 years old and is just getting his life together after a rough start. Now he has to start again.

This could very well turn out to be the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history. My husband told our family all about the happenings over dinner last night. As he talked about the rising water and the trapped people, I watched my six-year-old son’s lips tighten and his brow furrow.

“But, Daddy,” Brandon protested, “God said he’d never do that again. And He keeps His promises!”

“Do what again?” someone asked.

“Flood the world!” he exclaimed in a reference to the Noah story from the Hebrew Bible.

Brandon was angry. Others around the table jumped in quickly and tried to explain the particulars. When the rainbow appeared, God promised he wouldn’t flood the world again, but this was just a small portion of the world. Brandon didn’t care. That was a technicality to him.

“But he promised! He promised he wouldn’t flood, but he did and people are dying because of him? Why?”

The anxiety at the table was palpable. Some tried to explain the logic another way, but it was futile to this soft-hearted six-year-old. Hal stepped in and said, “Look everyone, there is no easy answer – let him question.” Later, after dinner we talked about how while God is all-powerful, sometimes bad things just happen. That’s life. It sometimes doesn’t make sense and easy answers only stop us from wrestling with that fact. They don’t really help, they just make us stop questioning.

While it hurts to watch my kids struggle, I hope my kids never stop asking those kinds of questions. I hope I never do either. The closest I’ve felt to God has been on the heels of me questioning him. The farthest away I’ve felt is when I listen to other people when they try to give me platitudes and easy answers. The sentiment I hate hearing the most is the dreaded, “God has a plan. He’s got some reason for your illness (or a flood).” That makes smoke come out of my ears. Not because it makes me question God, but for exactly the opposite reason. It’s too easy. That kind of thinking (and it’s prevalent, trust me) is based on the assumption that God GAVE me cancer and is sitting back smugly watching to see how I’ll handle his “gift”. Will I pass the test? Or will I “stand in the way” of his ultimate plan?

I think that’s a load of horse manure. That is not the God that I know and trust. My God hurts for those that are hurting.

He HATES that I have cancer, and he HATES seeing the bodies floating down city streets. He hates that my children cry in my lap at times asking me when I’m going to get better, and he hates the “flood” of crying children asking parents about fresh water, or whether their friends are even alive. He hates the fact that at 32 years old, I sometimes don’t even have the strength to get up off the couch, and he hates that so many thousands don’t even have couches anymore.

I refuse to believe that God is behind any of this tragedy. Does that mean he’s not all-knowing or all-powerful? No. It just means that we live in his created world, full of powerful forces that sometimes act against each other (love/hate, life/death, rains that nourishes/rains that flood). And sometimes, really terrible things happen because they do.

Yesterday, I read a quote in my LiveStrong notebook that I absolutely love: “When people tell me that cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them, I want to punch them in the face.” Cancer is terrible. It takes a perfectly good body and eats away at it. It takes everything you knew and held dear and turns it upside down. It fills your home with fear and uncertainty. Much like rising flood waters.

What I hold on to is that DESPITE the fact that bad things happen, my God has the power and desire to turn those bad things into good things, to bring rainbows after the flood. So I believe good things will come out of my cancer. They already have. And I have to believe that God can make good things come out of this terrible disaster too. That’s what makes him a powerful God. Who else could create the science, inspiration, and miracles that it takes to take a disease-ridden body and make it whole? Or the fortitude and hope it takes to take a debris-ridden city and build something better with it? (And knowing the faithful strength of the Cajun people firsthand—I’m from the bayou myself—I know New Orleans will be even better than before).

Such victories over tragedy are more triumphant and worthy of praise than a God who destroys in the first place and then watches like a mean school teacher to see what happens next. I hope my children grow up knowing the triumphant God. And I hope they always keep questioning.