Where was God this week, when two brothers, bound by blood and by football, met their end on a quiet motorway in Spain? When Diogo Jota, Liverpool’s dynamic forward and one of Portugal’s brightest talents, and his younger brother André Silva, a professional footballer in Portugal’s second division, were both killed in a devastating car crash?
It happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning, on the A-52 motorway near Zamora. The sleek Lamborghini they travelled in suffered a tyre blowout at high speed, veering violently off the road before erupting in flames. Both men, full of life and promise, died at the scene.
Diogo, just 28, had married Rute Cardoso eleven days earlier. He was a father of three, a son of Portugal, a hero to Liverpool fans. André, 25, was carving his own path as a footballer, playing for Penafiel, away from the bright lights but with a love for the game that matched his brother’s. They had been inseparable. Now they were gone.
Their funerals in Gondomar drew hundreds—family, friends, teammates, political leaders, and heartbroken supporters who lined the streets in silence, clutching flowers and shirts bearing their names. Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk and vice-captain Andy Robertson carried their coffins. Football paused. Portugal wept.
Perhaps?
But Portugal did not weep alone.
Across the world, in Gaza, another footballer laced his boots for the final time. Not on grass, but on rubble. He was killed this week, his young life extinguished not by accident but by the unrelenting violence that has become the backdrop of his people’s daily existence. His family, like so many others, is left with nothing but memories and the gaping silence of a future that will now never arrive.
Where was God when the floodwaters rose in Kerr County, Texas, without warning, in the dead of night? When a violent storm swept through the Guadalupe River valley, dropping ten inches of rain in just hours, erasing homes, cars, and lives?
In Texas, floodwaters rose with terrifying speed. The Guadalupe River burst its banks in the dead of night, sweeping through homes, camps, and roads. What began as a fierce rainstorm became a catastrophe. At least 51 people have now been confirmed dead, including 15 children and 36 adults, as of Sunday morning.
Among the missing are 27 girls from Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp along the river, swallowed by the floods. Families wait in agonising silence, clutching their phones, searching for names.
Thirteen-year-old Elinor Lester described being woken at 1:30am by the raging storm. The camp was gone by morning. “It was really scary,” she said, her voice cracking with the weight of what she had seen.
Families wait, still, for news. Mothers plead with authorities to release the names of those rescued. A man searches for his brother’s family, their house washed away completely. A nephew was found alive, rescued from a tree he had clung to for six long hours.
Officials insist there was no way to predict the magnitude of the flood. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States,” said Judge Rob Kelly. “But we had no reason to believe this would be anything like what happened here. None whatsoever.”
Elsewhere, the tragedies continued.
In Congo, violence forced more families to flee their homes, crossing into uncertainty with little more than what they could carry. In Ukraine, hospitals were once again hit by shelling, patients and doctors buried beneath rubble. In the Mediterranean, yet another migrant boat capsized, the sea swallowing dozens more souls chasing the faint promise of safety.
All over the world, the question lingers: Where was God this week?
Was He in the burning car on a Spanish motorway?
In the collapsed buildings of Gaza?
In the swirling black water that pulled children from their cabins in Texas?
In the hospitals struck by artillery?
In the wooden boats that never made it to shore?
Was He absent, silent amid the chaos? Or perhaps He was there—in the hands that carried the coffins of two beloved brothers, in the arms that lifted children from floodwaters, in the rescuers who scoured treetops and debris for signs of life, in the neighbours who refused to leave, in the mourners who filled Gondomar’s streets in the rain.
These are not questions that come with easy answers. But they are questions that must be asked.
Where was God this week?
Perhaps He was always there. Perhaps He is yet to be found.
Or perhaps, some will feel, He never came at all.
