Courage shielded her brother until the rescuers arrived.

This is from David Hart’s moving argument for the gospel’s God, The Doors of the Sea (2005). Read it when you are ready for something beautiful to take hold of your heart forever.

“In the New York Times this morning…there appeared a report from Sri Lanka recounting, in part, the story of a large man of enormous physical strength who was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing in the tsunami, and who—as he recited the names of his lost children to the reporter, in descending order of age, ending with the name of his four-year-old son—was utterly overwhelmed by his own weeping. Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe his anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God’s eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact, their deaths had mysteriously served God’s purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world. Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words; we would recognize that they would offer no…credible comfort…

“And this should tell us something. For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them; because what would still our tongues would be the knowledge (which we would possess at the time, though we might forget it later) that such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God. In the process, moreover, we would be attempting to deny that man a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love…

“[W]e Christian are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day—to look upon the entire littoral rim of the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children—and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the ultimate meaning or purpose residing in all that misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces—whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance—that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. …

“…the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days. As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy… . [W]e are able to rejoice that…God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new.'"