White Gowns in the Rubble

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In the chaotic aftermath, medical teams set up field hospitals in parking lots and churchyards. Survivors arrived covered head to foot in concrete dust and blood — Haitian market vendors, American missionaries, Dominican construction workers, French UN staff. The earthquake had made no distinction among them.

Volunteers gently washed the dust from their skin, cleaned their wounds, and dressed each one in identical white hospital gowns. Side by side on cots under canvas tarps, survivors from different nations, speaking different languages, shared the same stunned gratitude: they were alive. They had come through something terrible. And someone had cleaned them and clothed them and given them shelter.

John saw something like this, only infinitely greater. A vast multitude — from every nation, tribe, people, and language — standing together in white robes. Not because they had avoided suffering, but because they had come through it. "These are they who have come out of the great tribulation," the elder tells John. "They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

The seal of the living God marks His own not for exemption from the earthquake, but for rescue through it. And on the other side, every survivor stands clothed in the same grace, singing the same song of salvation to the Almighty.