Prayer for VT

Campus Crusade for Christ is calling all students and campuses to prayer tomorrow (April 19th) for the students of Virginia Tech. From their website:

"How You Can Pray

The staff team invites the watching world to join with them in prayer. Specifically, they ask people to pray for:

1. families and friends of the students who were killed, including the 4 students involved with Campus Crusade.
2. students who were injured during the shooting and are still in the hospital.
3. survivors of the shootings who witnessed the horrors of that day.
4. wisdom for the Campus Crusade staff members and other campus ministers and pastors as they seek to counsel and love the hurting students."

A Thousand Words

Though in a crisis moment everyone tends to turn on the tv to see video of events and hear the latest information, I've always felt that still photos do a better job of capturing emotion and creating the lasting image of events. When I think of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, it's the still photos that I remember. Video conveys the immediacy, but it's usually franetic and often comes with audio commentary that later proves to be wrong or caught up in the emotion of the moment.

I may be biased because of my own love for photography, but I think it's the photojournalists who really preserve history for us and help us understand tragedy. The talking heads on television end up becoming a blur. As usual, it's the photographs coming out today that have made me cry. The best photo essay I've found is from Time. I think the photos express what even 1000 words could not capture.

The Day After

I was off yesterday and so I managed to miss what was happening until mid-afternoon. It was hard to take in and hit close to home. I was still grappling with everything when I found something that helped make some sense of the display of evil I was seeing on my television:

Though the darkness closes in, I believe that God is on His throne, and that He is good beyond our wildest dreams. He is the Savior of the whole wide world. Yet we are living in shattered days, a faint image of what He hoped and dreamed for us all. And today, the weight of our fallen race seems too heavy to bear.

There's so much in the world that I don't understand. Days like today I'm afraid that I do understand, and it becomes hard to handle living in the world.