Disaster Aid Without Witness

I’m trained for disaster response.  Specifically, I’m one of the 80 thousand Southern Baptist yellow-shirted volunteers certified to help out in a disaster.

I’ve taken that training a step further.  I and others at my church have received Red Cross training in first-in damage assessment.  Sleeping in the truck first in.  Helping the Governor decide if it’s bad enough to make it a federal disaster area.  It gets me to where hurting people are.

I have a ham radio license.  I’m one of the 40 or so locals who actively participate in civic events like marshaling parades and parking cars at community events.  I train with the radio team and they know me.  In an emergency, I become a trusted agent with access to the shelters and the command post, as a minister of the gospel.

We train for commodity distribution, and when the church gave away 1600 boxes of food, our team did so efficiently and with smiles and prayers, ministering love with order and cooperation. (no one waited in line more than half an hour)

When we go in to “mud out” a flooded house, or take a chain saw team to remove downed trees, or set up a mobile kitchen to feed thousands a day, we do so to get close to hurting people who need to hear that God loves them, and in spite of present circumstances, has a wonderful plan for their life, and has brought me past the police checkpoint to minister His grace.

Because if I provide aid without a witness, I’m just another city volunteer, with a dead faith.  I want instead to work out my salvation to people who in that moment are anxious for a good word.

 

A Witness for God

Is God a god?  Is he the all-powerful supreme god? Even if you accept the existence of other gods (I don’t), our god is the God above all others.

Nemo235 posted an assertion that, since no one else was around when god created the world, we can’t know that it was God that did the creating.

To which I replied:

If I do something and tell you about it later, I am acting as a witness on my own behalf. Even if no one else was there to see it, if I say it happened, and you trust me to be truthful, then because I said it, you know that I did it. When God tells Adam, Eve, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Job that He created the world, because God is a reliable witness we know it to be true. (To assume God to be less than a reliable witness makes him less than a perfect god and not worth trusting for anything.) Therefore, there is no “non-existent witness.” God is the witness and that’s all I need.

I can’t prove God.  I can’t prove He does what He says He does.  But I have faith that all He says is internally consistent, and when He says something happened, then it must have happened.