A single survivor of the Air India plane crash found

A Boeing passenger plane bound for London crashed soon after taking off in India early this morning. I wrote today’s Daily Article in response to the news, but at the time, there was no official word as to casualties.

Now there is. 

Commissioner GS Malik of India has just announced, “It appears there are no survivors in the plane crash.” He added that “some locals would have also died” in the buildings into which it crashed and noted that “exact figures on casualties are being ascertained.”

Since that announcement, a single survivor has been found. Vishwashkumar Ramesh was reportedly in seat 11A aboard the flight and is currently recovering in a local hospital.

However, the other 241 passengers on board the airplane perished. They included 216 adults and 11 children. Of these, 169 were reportedly Indian nationals, 52 were Britons, seven were Portuguese, and one was Canadian.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called this morning’s tragedy “heartbreaking beyond words.”

My prayers seem not to have been answered

When I wrote my article earlier today, I was praying for those on the plane and on the ground to have somehow survived the crash. In one sense, this was an illogical thing for me to do. By the time I read the news, the crash had already happened. My prayer for people to survive came after the fact.

But in another sense, it did not. Because I was praying to the omniscient God who transcends time, he knew before the crash that I would be praying after it happened and could take my prayer into account in the moment the crash occurred.

Nonetheless, my prayers seem not to have been answered for all but one of the people on board. God is so omnipotent that he could have prevented the crash or spared its victims. He is so loving that it seems he would want to do so. And yet he did not.

If he were a human who acted in this way, it would be hard for us to trust him to act differently in the future. If he did not spare these victims, why would we ask him to spare the victims of future tragedies?

“Ask and keep on asking”

But we pray anyway. Even though he does not always do what we ask him to do, we keep asking.

This is not illogic or naivete on our part. Rather, it is biblical obedience: Jesus instructed us to “ask and keep on asking, and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7, my literal translation from the Greek). And it is our acknowledgement that our finite and fallen minds cannot comprehend an infinite and perfect God (cf. Isaiah 55:8–9).

If we could truly understand him, either we would be God or he would not be.

Even though we do not understand why God allows much of the suffering in our broken world, we know that praying is the way we position ourselves to receive all that God’s grace intends to give. And it is one way his Spirit shapes us as well.

Right now, you and I are thinking about God. When we pray, we are talking to him. We are in his very presence, where his Spirit works to mold us into the character of Christ (Romans 8:29).

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

But there’s a but.

You likely know everything I’ve written thus far, but if you’re like me, there are still doubts flickering in the back of our souls. Even if some of this theology is new to you, it may not be persuasive.

This is understandable. The blunt truth is that God could have spared 242 people in India this morning, but he did not. Multiply this times all the other deaths that will occur today, approximately 150,000 in total.

As I wrote in my Daily Article, Christians can and should see death as but the portal from this fallen world into God’s perfect presence. This is why we read, “Precious in the sight of the Lᴏʀᴅ is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15).

But even still, we wish it were not so. We wish the Lord would simply take us from this life into the next life without requiring that we pass through the pain of death and thus spare our loved ones the grief that will come when we die.

Here’s the hope I am embracing today: God can redeem even such questions and struggles by using them to draw us into greater dependence on him.

The sicker the patient, the more necessary the physician. The deeper our pain, the more we need the grace and strength only God can truly provide. The more we struggle to trust our Father, the more we need the peace that comes from such trust.

When we find it hard to have such faith, we can even ask for God’s help in the midst of our doubts. We can pray with the father of the demon-possessed child, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24 NKJV). And we will experience the presence of the ever-present Lord and say with David, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4).

“Deliberate confidence in the character of God”

So, I invite you to join me in praying for the families of the victims of this tragedy. Let’s ask God to redeem this horrible calamity by using it to draw many to himself. And let’s use it to choose faith over fear and trust over doubt.

Faith in our Father is easy when times are good and his ways make sense to us. But faith is most needed, real, and strengthened when it is hard. 

As Oswald Chambers noted, “Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

St. Anselm testified,

“I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather I believe in order that I may understand.”

In this life or in the life to come, we will understand what we do not understand today (1 Corinthians 13:12). In the meantime, we can choose faith.

And in choosing faith, we experience God.