Publisher’s Pen: Ready or Not?

Without warning, the ground swelled and walls came crashing down. At 2:15 a.m., the world was instantly and fiercely altered. Nearly every resident was “jolted from their beds by a violent earthquake. The ground heaved and pitched, hurling furniture, snapping trees,”1 destroying homes, and unleashing a fear unlike any they had ever known.

illustration by Viktor Miller-Gausa

Dale Mason
Publisher

On that night and on two more terrible days in the weeks after, events unlike any other imprinted on the minds of those who witnessed them. “8-year-old Godfrey Lesieur saw the ground ‘rolling in waves.’” Other people reported that “fissures ripped open fields, and geysers burst from the earth, spewing sand, water, mud and (even) coal high into the air.” Church bells shook and rang 700 miles away in Charleston, South Carolina.

In the two centuries following, we have gained a better understanding of how to avoid the devastation that high-magnitude earthquakes can cause. Now, tens of millions of people—and many tall skyscrapers—are spread throughout the midwestern US. Amazingly, the area impacted by the massive New Madrid quakes was “ten times larger than that affected by the magnitude [7.9] San Francisco earthquake of 1906,” which Dr. Andrew Snelling details in his timely feature article on page 36. Of course, most earthquakes happen at the edge of our planet’s major tectonic plates, such as California’s San Andreas fault. Yet, in contrast, earthquakes within plates such as the New Madrid event are not as easily predicted, and they can also be large and devastating.

As a born-and-raised Midwesterner, that New Madrid quake has always made me wonder. While we cannot be constantly ready to survive the next natural catastrophe, we can walk in repentance and the hope of heaven. We may not know when our life on earth will end, but we can be ready for it—by receiving the gift of eternal life made possible by the death and resurrection of our Creator and Savior, Jesus Christ!