Shortly after a tornado cut a swath right through the heart of Moore, Oklahoma in 1999 I was driving south on I-35, heading to another location. As I passed Moore on the highway I looked off to my left and saw the deadly path. Strangely enough the twister did a jig around a high place where a Baptist church sat, leaving it untouched. It was not so discriminating this time.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to the tough and tender folk of Moore who have endured more . There has already been an outpouring of help that comes in a form now familiar to us – the first responders, search and rescue, temporary shelter and provision, law enforcement and security. Next will come the recovery of the dead, FEMA and Red Cross, the insurance claims people, the utility companies. And finally there will be the long, slow trudge toward cleanup and rebuilding. It will require every dimension of local, state and federal government, helping agencies and private citizens. Religious organizations such as our own will mount their efforts. Work teams will go later to help after their presence will not be more a liability than a help.
God bless them and keep them, and may the God who does not dispatch storms as part of some cosmic plan or purpose be with them in ways both seen and unseen.
vitalwholeness 
I am reminded in the midst
That God is there, aching for the loss as are we all.
Wow–I came across this just now from your recent sermon:
“Do you know what I love most about the story of Tabitha? It’s this: Just when you think it is all over, it is really just beginning. Sometimes things nearly have to die for something new to get born.
If I were going to pick a yearlong theme for Broadway, it might be this one, The Year of Tabitha Rising. Imagine if our vision included being a community of hope where we affirmed and prayed for and participated in the thousand ways that people can be pulled back from the brink of oblivion and then transformed. Now that would be the Gospel story told again and again. The universal story reenacted in our own time. And it’s the kind of a vision that’s worth spending your life on.”
–Tim Carson, in “Tabitha Rising”
May it be so for Oklahoma.