Tragedies like the one in Texas remind all of us that none are exempt from the forces of nature that God has put in place.

“Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.
For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are.
Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.

For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.
We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)” — Romans 8:18-25 (NLT)

That hope is available to everyone that accepts Jesus as their Savior.

If one person dies on average once a year, then in 37% of years nobody dies, in 37% of years one person dies, and the rest of the time more than one person dies. 3 people would die in about 6% of years, roughly 1 in 20. Unusual, certainly.

Plus I’ve never seen footage of a large NM house plummeting down the brown waters of a flash flood.

There we’d get into media selection bias. Video of a house being washed away in a flood is rarer than houses washing away in floods, but more common than it used to be with the ubiquity of phone cameras. I can find a lot of them online for floods in recent years that I don’t remember anything about. I don’t have any way to ballpark how common that should be.

The worst flooding where I live was in 1975, long before I was here. The only fatalities, fortunately, were cattle, but hundreds of people had to be evacuated from their homes. There was a rush of water when a dike failed, but the real problem was just that everything was under water for days.

In the Seattle metropolitan area you will see million-dollar houses (i. e. 3-4 bedrooms) packed in tight together next to giant, flat, open green areas without trees. There is a very good reason they are not built on… For the most part the flooding here is very predictable. The annual flooding usually closes some of the roads and some towns where people commute are entirely cut off.

New Mexico has flash floods every year and according to the average, one person dies every year. So three dead in a NM flash flood is unusual.

Plus I’ve never seen footage of a large NM house plummeting down the brown waters of a flash flood.

I don’t know whether this flood relates to the one in Texas, beyond being an area prone to such floods.

Re: shark attacks — I feel required to mention we just had the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” a couple weeks ago. 🙂

It’s never a mistake to cue up Dreyfuss, Scheider, Shaw and the Great Fake Shark to relive the magic of the first modern Hollywood summer blockbuster.

We learned to communicate that way when AesopSpouse goes camping and I’m at home (which is most of the time).
He also takes at least one of his portable ham radios, more if the adults know how to use them, and has a mobile unit in each car.
Plus the 40′ antenna at the house.
And lots more toys.

AM radio signals, though, should be receivable just about anywhere.

Also, for cell phones, there are conditions where a voice call cannot be completed but a text message will get through.

Whatever the annual accumulation in Texas and similar areas, they get it HARD when it happens.

I don’t know how it rains elsewhere. Here on the coast north of Corpus Christi, I follow storm cells often on Weather Underground, and it’s not at all uncommon for the severe ones to show an intensity of 10 inches an hour. I see them fairly nearby every few weeks. The area affected tends to be small, but if it happens at the head of a funnel-shaped riverbed, it can generate a very high very fast flash flood.

Lucky for us, we’re near the coast where it’s nearly flat. When we get 10-20 inches of rain, some areas flood, but the water isn’t moving fast.

Someone else also linked Dreher’s piece. I appreciated it. He pushes back hard against “everything happens for a reason”. One of my best friends wrote an excellent book after their eight year old son died within 24 hours from a blood infection. He also pushed back against those who say God wills and controls everything that happens. Dreher focuses largely on the example of Christ who cried (as did my friend when they learned their son had died) “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We cry out. And trust God. We hold these two in tension.

In Morgoth’s Ring (edited by Christopher Tolkien) is a dialogue between Finrod Felagund and an elderly woman named Adanel. Finrod carefully distinguishes two elven words for “hope”. One (amdir?) is hope in the sense of optimism. The other is estel, which Finrod explains means something more like deep trust. We get a taste of that when Gandalf and Pippin are in Minas Tirith and boy it looks like the forces of Sauron are going to win. And when Aragon leads the combined armies of the free peoples of Middle Earth to the Black Gate of Mordor.

“We’re going to die. But we trust and don’t give up”.

In my own preaching – especially at the dear church in Livingston where we served for five years and which experienced grief and loss during the pandemic – I have sometimes said something along the lines of “the purposes of God are ultimately for good”. Which is not wrong. But might not be the best thing to preach to families reeling from the illness and death of a beloved family member.

My mentor in the United Methodist Church gently corrected me and said “it’s a mystery” and to leave it at that.

This is going to be “flood summer”, is it? Like “shark attack summer” in 2001? Is the national media going to latch on to every flood and try to make the country hallucinate some kind of sui generis flood crisis?

In terms of absolute minutes of television coverage on the three major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—shark attacks were 2001’s third “most important” news story prior to September 11, behind the western United States forest fires, and the political scandal resulting from the Chandra Levy missing persons case. However, the comparatively higher shock value of shark attacks left a lasting impression on the public. According to the International Shark Attack File, there were 76 shark attacks that occurred in 2001, lower than the 85 attacks documented in 2000; furthermore, although five people were killed in attacks in 2001, this was fewer than the 12 deaths caused by shark attacks the previous year.

Where I live we get flooding in fall almost always and spring sometimes. There’s a few roads where the houses have one, or two, blank stories. If I see those in national media I will know what is up. It’s easy get dramatic-looking pictures of it.