Quotidian Grace has some harrowing and heartbreaking stories of Katrina. The devastation is pretty hard even to fathom.

I admit that I don’t have any/many personal connections to New Orleans or the Mississippi coast. Growing up in Houston, I lived with the reality of hurricanes; one blew through when I was 11 and crushed a live oak tree onto our house. We lost power, but our neighbor still had electricity, so we ran extension cords from his place to ours. We played in the flooded street. Little things. Benign things.

My heart goes out to people who’ve lost homes and loved ones, and especially to those who are involuntarily stranded in areas hit by the hurricane… And assuming that this is the place where I get to be honest and real, I will say that I frankly don’t understand the mentality of people who willfully ignore mandatory evacuation orders. And I probably need to repent for my hard heart which says that those who ignored the order to evacuate, and who are now sitting on the roofs of their homes, should get picked up only after everyone who couldn’t evacuate gets picked up. Or perhaps they should be billed for the expense. (Lord have mercy upon me.)

A conservative Christian group is suggesting that Katrina is God’s punishment for New Orleans’s having 5 abortion clinics. Part of their evidence for this is the fact that the satellite photo of the storm hitting New Orleans apparently resembles a 6-week-old fetus. Mmm-kay.

NPR had an interview with a rescue worker, and I was amazed by his calm presence of mind. He and his teams are carefully, efficiently and methodically helping as many people as they can. And they are trying to triage based on severity of situation, number of people involved, etc. But surely he knows better than anyone that they will not reach everyone in time. Some people will live and some people may die based on his actions and those of his teams. And yet he presses on. He is my model for ministry, where there are always more needs and opportunities than there are hours in the day. And if this man can keep his head, and do the best he can each day, and find peace with that the best he can, then surely I can too, where the circumstances are much less dire.