When sorrows like sea billows roll. . .

Who can fail to be moved by the growing tragedy and desperation of the residents of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Many will never be "residents" of their own home towns again. Thousands are believed to have lost their lives; tens of thousands have lost family members and friends; hundreds of thousands have lost homes, jobs, churches, community connections; an unbelievable number have lost health and personal dignities that were taken for granted just last week. The nation and the world watch as the best and worst of humanity are displayed on the screens of those blessed enough to have electricity.

It was only nine months ago that we watched a much larger tragedy on the other side of the world. Despite the difference in scope, there are many similarities between "our" hurricane and "their" tsunami: life-giving water became a life-taker; families were fractured; the building blocks of civilization became the backdrop of chaos, disease and despair. Monuments fell. Towns disappeared. Agnostics prayed.

I've been watching all this with interest on many levels. Today I've been attempting to watch through the eyes of my children and grandchildren. I believe that many times we forget how little ones can be shaped by the large events in their world, and many times they're shaped in ways we don't expect. I grew up during the Cold War and spent several of my childhood years living in Europe in the shadow of missiles that could have annihilated life as we knew it. I took arithmetic, grammar, history, and nuclear bomb drills. That shaped me. A year after my return to the States, I walked in to my fourth grade class after lunch one late fall afternoon to hear that the President had been shot and killed. I had shaken his hand less than 24 hours before his death. That shaped me. My parents probably didn't spend a lot of time that November thinking about how the world would shape me. . . parents in the sixties were more likely to be thinking about how their kids would shape the world. But I became a product of these and several other events between the Korean war and Watergate. I'm now in my fifties, still bearing the marks the mid-20th century left on my heart.

So today I watch the children as they watch. . .connected much more closely to their outside world than I ever was with our one black-and-white TV and a treasured transistor radio. Walter Cronkite told me what was news each evening; there was no way to google "atomic warhead." My children have a better grasp of the events that will shape them than I could ever have dreamed of having. I look for ways to influence the shape these things will take in their minds and hearts; I pray for opportunities to give them tools with which to influence their world.

One of those opportunities may come very close in these next days. Our city will become a major "recipient" of thousands of families displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Just tonight I received an email from a local group urging us to help with housing, food, clothing, and employment for the arriving busloads of stunned men, women and children. And I bowed my head and realized that how John and I respond and how we involve our children in our decisions and actions will become part of the way this tragic event gets stored in their hearts. Hearts of compassion and a few simple but selfless actions could set the stage for a life of servanthood. A cup of cold water served in Jesus' Name will, God willing, be a major factor in how my children and grandchildren respond to a lost and hurting world for the rest of their lives.

So. . .we will pray, we will discuss, we will give, we will look for opportunities to serve. And we will trust that those moments we share as a family will bear fruit not just in the aftermath of a storm, but in all of life.