A drawing I don't like

Someone emailed me a sketch the other day, entitled "What Really Happened on the Hudson."

It appears beautiful, at first glance, showing divine hands holding up that plane that crashed into the Hudson River recently, protecting the occupants from a watery death.

But something in me does not like that mode of thinking at all.

Those divine hands could just as easily have brushed away that flock of geese a few minutes before, preventing the whole terrifying ordeal.

Those divine hands have apparently been withheld when scores of other planes have gone down.

Why would an impartial God save one plane and allow another to crash, each containing a relative random grouping of people, some probably good, some probably evil? I mean, I could understand if some Mafia dons or a gang of Neo-nazis or Bin Laden and his buddies had chartered a flight and God stood by and calmly let it slam into a mountainside ...

I'm not one of those people who finds the existence of evil to be the disproving of God's reality ... although I question the wisdom in creation of such fiendish horrors as candiru, guinea worms and cystic fibrosis. I can grant that sickness and pain can teach important life lessons and shape our character -- but worms that gnaw their way through your feet -- what do those poor African villagers learn from that?

I have chosen to believe this year and I will believe. But I still don't like the picture of those hands. What if you were a relative of someone who was incinerated in a plane on Sept. 11, 2001? How would you react to the implicit message that God directly intervened to save these folks but let your loved ones die?