How Could God Allow This?

I hadn't been on speaking terms with God for three years before that fateful spring day in 1995. My anger didn't happen overnight. It was a process that started when I first began my residency in emergency medicine and trauma. It's not as though God had ever done anything to hurt me. I had had a good life, loving parents, a caring, supportive wife and three great kids. It was what I saw in the emergency room that fueled my fury. Like the 18-month-old girl who had been raped then beaten to death. How could God allow this to happen? I wondered time and time again.

And then came April 19. Still dressed in scrubs and a lab coat, I left University Hospital at 8:00 a.m. after a 12-hour shift. In my four years at the hospital, I had always gone straight home after work to get some sleep. But when another physician invited me to the Cattlemen's Steakhouse for breakfast, for some reason I decided to go along. Heather Taylor, a paramedic student, joined us.

We drove downtown. I ordered pancakes and we talked shop, discussing cases from the night before. We were just about to leave when...

There was a thunderous boom, rattling the dishes and shaking the windows. "That was an explosion!" I said. As we sat stunned, a man appeared in the door of the restaurant. "Looks like the Federal Building collapsed!" he yelled.

I bolted to the door. To the northeast a brown cloud billowed in the sky, and debris drifted in the air. My wife worked seven blocks from the Federal Building. I grabbed a nearby phone and called her office but couldn't get through. I dialed her cell phone and breathed a sigh of relief when I heard her voice; she was running late and still at home.

"Don't go to work." I told her what I knew, then rushed to my car. Heather climbed in with me, and we drove toward the Federal Building.

The mile between the restaurant and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building looked like a scene from a war movie. A dark haze loomed ominously; the road was crusted with shattered glass and shards of metal. About four blocks from the Federal Building, the roads were impassable. I parked the car, and Heather and I ran toward the building while hundreds of bleeding, weeping people ran past us in the other direction.

As I got my first glimpse of the Federal Building, I gasped. The entire north side had been ripped away; desks and cabinets dangled from the nine-story building. The smoking remains looked violated, obscene.

Every car within two blocks was flat, as if smashed by some giant fist. All the automobiles in the parking lot across the street were in flames. I climbed into the wreckage and stood looking down into a crater some 30 feet wide and 12 feet deep. It looked like an open grave for computers, chairs and file cabinets.