so many prayers...

My prayers (for safety and also for freedom-from-fear) are going out to the people in Southern California who are affected by the fires. I don't just have IIFs (Invisible Internet Friends) out there, I have flesh-and-blood friends and also flesh-and-blood relatives (a cousin - as far as I know he's okay; I haven't heard anything. We don't talk on a regular basis so I'm not worried that I've not heard anything).

I do not live in a fire-prone region (our main natural-disaster threat is tornadoes, which is different from a fire storm in a lot of ways), so I don't know what it's like but it looks very frightening.

And as Emily said on her blog - stay safe, and when they tell you to leave, you pay attention to that, okay? Don't make this another New Orleans.

At any rate - stay safe. Hopefully some of the giant tanker planes the Feds are sending today will help make a dent in the fires.

And more personal prayers, prayers of another sort:

Joel has a beautiful post up about prayers for Lauren (the tiny child with neuroblastoma; the one upon whose behalf a great many FOs have been issued against cancer on the FFOT. And you know...when I think about it, in a kind of twisted way those FOs themselves are a form of prayer...a recognition that something is Not Right and a hope that somehow things can change). He compares the situation to the OT lectionary reading from this past Sunday, how Aaron and Hur held up Moses' hands against the Amelekites (I have to admit this is a passage I am less familiar with than many). And Joel observes that praying for others is like that - that you are helping them to hold up their hands, that you are providing some amount of strength and assistance to them in a difficult time.

It's a nice metaphor and one I will remember. I earlier talked about how I sometimes envisioned prayer as sort of an invisible spiritual net that the pray-ers try to set up under the person being prayed for. And I like that image too, because it reminds me to pray for the FAMILIES of the afflicted person as well. As someone who has had seriously ill relatives, I'm well aware that the family members are almost as much in need of that "net" to hold them up as the ill person is.

One of the things that strikes me - and humbles me again and again - about people of faith is how WILLING - no, how EAGER they are to offer up prayers for assistance or healing for people they have never even met. I think it's perhaps because so many of them see us as being all connected...it's kind of like the bit in one of the early Star Wars movies where (I think it was) Ben Kenobi made the comment that he "felt a great disturbance in the Force" when the evil Empire snuffed out a bunch of innocent lives.

(And I have to say I liked the Old-School Star Wars way of dealing with the Force - leaving it somewhat mysterious, so that you could almost accept that it was their way of describing the Holy Spirit - rather than the New-School "midchlorian" explanation, which seemed clunky and mechanistic and not-full-of-wonder to me. When I was a kid, I loved the idea of the Force.)

At any rate - that kind of plugged-in, everyone-is-my-brother-deep-down feeling - it's a good thing.

One of the memorable scenes from My Antonia - which is one of my favorite novels - is when the Mr. Shimerdas (the father of the recent-immigrant, Bohemian family) starts to pray over something (I don't remember what) in front of Jim Burden and his grandfather. Now, the Shimerdas are foreign (and, presumably, Catholic - and Jim and his grandparents are old frontier Protestant), and there's a moment where you think there might be some rejection there (remembering how badly some Protestants in my country have treated Catholics over the years - and that's one thing I think we as Protestants should be ashamed of), but it doesn't happen - Mr. Shimerdas' prayer is accepted by those being prayed for. And later, Jim's grandfather makes the comment that, "The prayers of all good people are good."

And you know? I believe that.