The collapse makes no sense. It simply shouldn’t have happened. People driving home from work should not die because a bridge suddenly buckles. The engineers may well find an explanation, a technical explanation, for what occurred. That explanation will still not make much sense to our souls.
I heard yesterday that a former colleague – a still young woman – passed away. My response was the natural human response, “What happened?”
I didn’t just want to know, I needed to know.
Death never really makes sense. This our hearts know best. There isn’t a death – save for the wickedest despots – that gives our souls relief. Even when the very old die our hearts, our souls, still skip a beat. There is still a sad heaviness. There is still the knowledge that this isn’t the way things were meant to be.
That is because this isn’t how things were meant to be. We were not made to die. We were made to live.
I don’t mean this in a rah-rah sense; not in a motivational speaker sense.

I mean it at the core of who we are.
There may be no better proof for God’s existence than this very thing – the soul’s instinct that it was made to live. That is what makes today’s horror so unacceptable to us. These men and women and children were doing what they were supposed to be doing – working and living normal lives. They were living by the “rules” and yet in an instant they were gone without goodbyes, without moments to ponder or come to terms with their own passing.
Jesus taught over and over again that life was fleeting. Paul called us all “vapors”. In our information-saturated world I think we forget that because there is a temptation to believe we can explain everything.
We can’t. We can’t explain suffering. We can’t explain pain or disease or tragedy…not really.
That is why the collapse makes no sense. It never will. We mourn and we pray and we might scream or yell or cry or curse. But that is ok because hurting souls do that and because Jesus knows exactly what that is like because more than anyone else he knows that we aren’t made to die.