Article March 1, 2010 Issue

PRAYERS FROM JAPAN ABOUT NATURAL DISASTERS

KAZUHIKO KANEDA

First appeared on spirituality.com on January 13, 2010

IN THE PAST YEAR, reports of earthquakes in Italy and China, as well as the more recent earthquake in Haiti, have threatened to shake us up mentally. Whether you live in a country like Japan, where people are expecting big earthquakes, or in an area where earthquakes are rare, these occurrences are not something to ignore. For instance, in Kobe, Japan, where the possibility of earthquake was believed to be unlikely, a big earthquake occurred in 1995.

But it's important neither to be afraid of nor to ignore natural disasters, nor to give up on praying about them. Through Christian Science, I've learned that, through spiritual reasoning, an accurate understanding of God's power can help protect us and allow us to have more dominion over what are considered natural disasters.

I used to wonder why we were having destructive earthquakes if God is real, In the past, it was too difficult to answer this question, so I stopped thinking about it. But in the last decade or so, I started to ask this question again. And to think about it from a spiritual basis.