Seeing Only What We Want to See

There is an odd thing that happened after the recent fires in Los Angeles. Some places were burned, and some were not. That is not what is odd. It is odd that a number of stories came out that the homes of certain Catholics had not been burned (some had done the Epiphany blessing before the fires, others had their homes blessed by a priest, one person had just come back to the Catholic faith); most were sitting right in the middle of other homes that were burned completely.

Why, you may ask, is this odd? It is odd because no one seems to have noticed the homes of non-catholics, and even a few outright pagans, that had not been burned. There were a number of them. I watched one video of a man who is walking up to his home and seeing it in perfect condition. He starts cussing up a storm out of shock; he does not thank God (or even any false deity), but is just happy. No one made a big acknowledgement about it, but it did happen.

If we, as Catholics, know that God is not passive in these things, then the first question to ask is, were any of these a sign from God? It is possible that God blessed those Catholics with protecting their homes, and that He also gave a blessing to the pagans so that they could see His hand and have an opportunity to believe in Him. There are many possibilities, but we will likely never know the mind of God on what He was doing.

What we cannot do, in this instance or others, is to presume that God blessed Catholics and punished pagans. What about all the other Catholics whose homes and all their possessions were destroyed? Were they worse sinners so God smacked them? The clear message of the Book of Job in the Old Testament is that that kind of thinking is really, really bad theology. Sometimes good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Because we know that, we need to be very careful about pointing out things like "unburned homes". We may know the goodness of God is always greater than we can imagine; we do not, however, know perfectly the mind of God.

Let us be careful not to see just what we want to see. Let us not use arguments for our faith that are stretched; it makes us look foolish when pagans catch us stretching the truth. Does God bless people by protecting them? Yes. Let us give Him thanks for that. Does God do things that are mysterious and hard to explain? Yes (just ask Job about it!). Do not put your faith in special signs or your faith will end up a weak faith. Our faith is only supposed to be in God Himself.