Turn your thoughts to North Queensland

While we wait to see just how bad this is,

please turn your thoughts and prayers to the people of Queensland.

I do have family up there.

This will be my only post during this time of emergency.

comparison

Update Thursday morning

While bad, the cyclone could have been much worse.

The candle above symbolises thoughts or prayers – that’s all it does. I am sure though that some will have woken this morning believing these thoughts and prayers have been effective. Indeed they may have been, but in an interesting post today on prayer Hacking Christianity writes:

To me, it doesn’t really matter what you think about the efficacy of petitionary or intercessory prayer, whether God chooses to heal people, whether God doesn’t notice things unless we pray for them, whether God will bring peace to Egypt if we pray. What matters is that you love a person, you love peace, you love God’s children, then you pray for them. When we are helpless to do anything else to help someone we love, then we pray. It’s an expression of love, a necessary component of our relationship with one another and with God. Referencing the Simone Weil quote above, when we can do nothing else to provide for a person’s needs, we can pray as not only an affirmation of our faith in God, but as a expression of our love for God’s creation.

Is it efficacious? Will it make a difference? I don’t know and I don’t think I’m disrespecting God in my doubts. But if I love a person, persons, or a common good, then I pray as a component of my other expressions of love, trusting in God to do the rest.

To the people who I say I will pray for you and forget, or don’t, or won’t…I am sorry. I will try harder to remember that I pray not out of belief in what the prayer does or means, but I pray because that’s what love looks like when I cannot do anything else.

We pray to love not for the results. There, that’s what I wanted to say and it came right at the end of this blog post. Wow. Is it really that simple?

Thoughts? Anyone out there?

I am sure all thoughts and prayers for the people of North Queensland are of equal weight as expressions of love and concern.