The earthquake nobody died in

One · What happened

Twenty-seven hurt and nobody dead

AP placed the epicenter about six miles southwest of Pitaloza Arriba, a small town in Herrera province, at a depth of about six miles. A second quake of magnitude 6.6 struck the same day. Aftershocks ran past a hundred, AP reported. AFP said the shaking was felt across a country of roughly four and a half million people, with Panama City about a hundred and twenty miles from the epicenter. Earthquakes are rare in Panama, the agency added, and most of them strike the western province of Chiriquí.

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, said, as AFP reported on 10 October, “We are facing a major disaster.” He also said some roads had completely collapsed. In La Villa de Los Santos the Church of San Atanasio came down, a building that had held national historic heritage status since 1938. The cathedral at Penonomé partly collapsed, AP reported, and Civil Protection counted at least thirteen churches affected. AP put the damage at about four hundred and twenty homes and a similar number of public schools, along with seven hotels and nine bridges, spread across all ten provinces. Health Minister Fernando Boyd told AFP that the town of Tonosí could not be reached by land. The education ministry suspended classes across the country.

Malitzie Rivera, deputy director of the National Civil Protection System, gave AP the injury count as twenty-seven, from minor to moderate. On Saturday, 10 October, the government declared a state of emergency, which Presidential Minister Juan Carlos Orillac announced at a news conference. Carlos Valdés, who heads the seismology department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, suggested to AP that Panama’s strict building codes may explain the comparatively low toll. Tony Jiménez, whose house partly collapsed, said of the shaking, “It was intense.”

Two · What it is doing

A loss with no funeral in it

Salomon Andion, forty-six, told AFP he was frightened because the shaking was very strong and went on for a long time. He left his fifteen-story building a second time when the aftershocks came. A reader gets the count before Andion and may never reach him, and twenty-seven hurt and nobody dead sends the story to the pile for things that turned out fine. The heart keeps a short list of what counts as a tragedy, with a body in a casket at the top. By that list the damaged homes are weather. The church the government had listed as heritage in 1938 gets the same treatment, and so does the road that cut a whole town off by land. People who lost those things on Friday have, by the reader’s own rule, nothing yet to grieve.

AP quoted Valdés as saying only that the codes may explain the toll. A second reader finds something to do with the remark anyway. If you paid for a structural inspection on your own house, the glow of having been right arrives before you have asked how the fallen church wall was built. The step from the codes held to the careless got what they had coming takes about a second. Nobody has to say the conclusion for it to be believed. No report said why one house stood while its neighbor fell.

AFP noted that earthquakes are rare in Panama. Anyone in a quiet place has the same ground under his chair. For a second after reading about Herrera he feels that floor as something he has been assuming for years. A reader can feel sorry for Panama for a whole minute and go on assuming that nothing under his own house could ever move. Then the thought goes the way the count went, filed under the sentence that it happened somewhere else. Andion, by AFP’s account, left his building twice.

Three · Where the ground is

The kingdom that does not shake

The writer of Hebrews told a congregation that God’s voice shook the earth at Mount Sinai. God had now promised, he wrote, to shake the earth and the heavens both, a promise Haggai had first carried to Jerusalem. The writer hears in its “Yet once more” the “removal of things that are shaken,” so that “things that cannot be shaken may remain.” Houses and church walls sit among the things that have been made. Nothing in the passage promises that any particular wall will survive. He closes by telling the congregation to be “grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:26–28).

Haggai spoke to men rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. He asked which of them was left who remembered the house in its former glory, then put the question to them, “Is it not as nothing in your eyes?” (Haggai 2:3). Nobody in the book is told that the sorrow was out of proportion. The men are told to be strong and to work, and the LORD of hosts gives the reason, “I am with you” (Haggai 2:4). The people of La Villa de Los Santos lost a church that the nation had protected since 1938. A town is allowed to mourn a church like that.

Asaph wrote a psalm in which God himself speaks. The line reads, “When the earth totters, and all its inhabitants, it is I who keep steady its pillars” (Psalm 75:3). Scripture attaches no explanation to what happened in Herrera on Friday. The psalm names who keeps the pillars steady and stops there, with no word about why the ground trembled in Herrera. Anyone who supplies a reason, for the families in damaged houses or for himself in an undamaged one, is adding to what the psalm says.

Two builders and a hillside

Jesus closed the Sermon on the Mount with two men building houses. The wise man’s house stood when “the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:25). The foolish man built on sand, and his house “fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:27). The difference Jesus names lies in his own words, which the first man hears and does and the second hears and leaves alone. Masonry and permits never come up. A reader who feels vindicated by an inspection certificate has misread the parable. So has the reader who sees a fallen wall and takes it for a verdict on the family inside.

The afternoon the rocks split

“The earth shook, and the rocks were split,” Matthew records of the afternoon Jesus died (Matthew 27:51). The centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what had happened, and they were filled with awe. Awed, they called Jesus “the Son of God” (Matthew 27:54). God gives the kingdom that cannot be shaken to the people who trust the man who died there in the place of sinners. A believer who stands in that kingdom is kept there by God. The walls of his house are a smaller matter. Anyone who has not yet trusted Jesus has just been told where the footing is.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Five jobs fit into an ordinary week. None of them needs a plane ticket or an opinion on how Panama builds.

1. 01

   Pray for the town the road no longer reaches.

   Tonosí, the town AFP said could not be reached by land, is the one to name. Pray for its people each morning this week, and for whoever is flying or driving toward them. God told Jerusalem, “the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you” (Isaiah 54:10). Ask him to let any believers in Tonosí hear that sentence from him this week.

2. 02

   Bolt the tallest bookcase to the wall.

   Walk through your house and find the tallest thing that could fall across a bed or a chair, usually a bookcase. Anchor it with a strap or two brackets from the hardware store. Proverbs says, “The wisest of women builds her house” (Proverbs 14:1). A strap on a bookcase is that kind of care for a body in a real house, and it carries no promise that the wall will hold.

3. 03

   Offer your living room to the church.

   Call your pastor this week and ask where the congregation would meet if its building came down tomorrow. Offer your own living room as one answer. Count the chairs you have before you dial. In Acts the church gathered at the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, “where many were gathered together and were praying” (Acts 12:12).

4. 04

   Write to someone who lost a house or a job.

   Think of a person at church or on your street who lost a roof to a fire or a paycheck to a layoff. Mail a handwritten note this week that names the loss as a real one and offers a supper to be delivered on a night of the family’s choosing. Romans 12:15 gives the instruction, “weep with those who weep.” A stamp on the envelope is the whole of the first step.

5. 05

   Own up to the shrug.

   Tell a friend you trust, or your pastor, what you did with the number twenty-seven when you read it. Describe the filing, or the grade you gave the builders, as it happened. Proverbs 28:13 puts it this way, “he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.” Mercy is on offer for a small sin like that one.