It is Wednesday, and back in my hometown in the Ohio Valley, Katrina, now past her prime, still has the power to flood the streets, shut off the lights, and ruin lives for months, perhaps years. It is Wednesday and here in Manassas we have yet, to my knowledge, to hear from any of our loved ones living on the Gulf. It is Wednesday, the third day since Katrina made landfall and people are still without potable water, food, shelter. Some scrounge what they can find to feed their children. Some others call this looting. I don’t know. Carting away a television, or a six-pack of Sam Adams would be looting, but getting potable water to a child after three days without it– if that is looting I would be a looter.

Had Katrina really been a woman she surely would have felt she had something to prove. Early last week, when she was just a young thing, a tropical storm in frilly socks, the weather people wondered if she’d amount to much. At her coming out party across southern Florida she served notice that the new girl had potential. Yet even after she slammed into the Louisiana coast as one of the three worst, and certainly the largest Gulf storm on record, the weather people came out on their balconies Monday morning and said “she went a little east, she wasn’t so bad.” Of course those news people in the Big Easy seemed not to consider that points east – Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile – were definitely NOT spared. Then we started to see the aerials from Mississippi and Alabama. The levees broke and the water started to rise in New Orleans. Now we know just what Katrina was capable of doing. Governor Blanco of Louisiana said “This is our Tsunami,” and we know she is not exaggerating.

It is Wednesday, and back in my hometown in the Ohio Valley, Katrina, now past her prime, still has the power to flood the streets, shut off the lights, and ruin lives for months, perhaps years. It is Wednesday and here in Manassas we have yet, to my knowledge, to hear from any of our loved ones living on the Gulf. It is Wednesday, the third day since Katrina made landfall and people are still without potable water, food, shelter. Some scrounge what they can find to feed their children. Some others call this looting. I don’t know. Carting away a television, or a six-pack of Sam Adams would be looting, but getting potable water to a child after three days without it– if that is looting I would be a looter.

The National Guard, FEMA, the American Red Cross, and the Army Corps of Engineers, were able to start rescue, and repair efforts yesterday and it all made for riveting television. So much so that 640 Iraqi women and children being trampled to death in Baghdad, got less than 60 seconds coverage on the two news broadcasts I watched. Maybe there will be some home video of that disaster later, and we’ll get more details. Without the visuals, though, I doubt it. We will, however, be sure to get several minutes of predictions about gasoline prices.

No one knows how many dead there are on the Gulf coast, or how many more will die this week before they are rescued. Perhaps an accurate count will never be possible. What is without doubt is that for millions of people life will not be the same for a long, long time. What is also doubtless is that the rest of us won’t pay attention that long. When the rescue cages stop ascending with human cargo into helicopters, and the flood waters recede leaving behind several feet of muck – when riveting television fades into bleak and endless toil (probably about the time Brittany Spears has her baby), we’ll go on to something else.

But God will not.

I have heard some attribute the wrath of Katrina to the wrath of God, since so many floating Casinos were destroyed. I’d be afraid to make such a statement, to be so arrogant as to speak as God’s natural disaster press secretary. I feel confident, however in repeating what He said:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? - and yet not one of the falls to the ground apart from your Father. The very hairs of your head are numbered. Don’t be afraid, you are worth many sparrows. Matthew 10.29-31

Two birds on a stick was the cheapest meal you could buy from a street vendor in Jerusalem, and those birds each had an identity. When they died God knew it. God’s attention is not fickle and fleeting. Let ours not be. We have a lot of work, worry, and praying yet to do. Let us not be distracted from it.