My heart goes out to these unfortunate victims of such a tremendous natural disaster. We flew into Sri Lanka from India right after the 2004 tsunami and coordinated the worldwide Assemblies of God effort to help in the rescue and reconstruction of that devastated country. To God credit, we started with almost nothing but through the generosity of Christians around the world, eventually a 1,000 homes were built or reconstructed, along with some 35 churches, 8 schools, an orphanage enlarged, and, I believe, something like 250 boats and nets provided to fishermen who had lost everything. Feeding the people and medical care was rather easy; however, the emotional trauma was our most difficult hurdle. Fortunately a team of Christian psychologists and counselors offered their services, and we took advantage of that by setting up seminars to instruct pastors and others to do grief counseling. Now, these seminars have developed into an on-going educational process that is part of our ministerial training there. So, all in all, God’s glory prevailed I believe.

Now, this brings me to a blog recommendation. I think we should critique Pat Robertson’s suggestion that a Haitian “pact with the Devil” brought about the earthquake that devastated the Caribbean nation. Was he justified? Or can anyone really know the mind of God in these things?

Ditto.