The Ground Beneath Hatay

On February 6, 2023, at 4:17 a.m., the ground beneath southern Turkey buckled. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake toppled thousands of buildings across Hatay province in seconds. Concrete floors pancaked. Roads split open. The mountains along the Syrian border shuddered exactly as the psalmist described — the earth giving way, mountains falling into the heart of the sea.

In the city of Antakya — the ancient Antioch where believers were first called Christians — entire neighborhoods vanished in under a minute. Yet in the days that followed, rescue teams pulled survivors from impossible depths of rubble. Some had been trapped for over a hundred hours. Volunteers from dozens of nations poured into that shattered city before dawn each morning, digging with bare hands through freezing rain.

The Almighty did not prevent the earthquake. The ground still shook. But God was within that broken city at the break of day, just as He promised. When the earth gave way and the mountains quaked, the Most High showed up in the hands of strangers who crossed oceans to dig through concrete for people they had never met.

Psalm 46 never promises the mountains won't fall. It promises that when they do, God is already there — and that He makes desolations cease. Not by preventing the shaking, but by being the stillness at the center of it.