Please pray...

This time of the week, I'm usually posting something about prayer. Today I just want to ask people to take a moment to pray about the disaster that is happening across the nation from where I live, in Victoria (south-east Australia).

Summer in Australia has brought freak weather for as long as I can remember; often torrential downpours with devastating winds that cause flash floods, sometimes raging heat that brings horrifying bushfires. I still remember the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983, when, just seven years old, I stood in my Adelaide hills back yard and watched the sky glow an eerie red with flames over the horizon in the next valley, while I urged my father to get all the dead leaves from our gutters, as I listened to the radio instructions. Later I remember being told that a girl in my older brother's class had her house burnt down. This week, Victoria is suffering another nightmare of uncontrollable and unpredictable bushfires, at least three times as bad as the Ash Wednesday fires.

It has been very hot in the past week, with temperatures in the eastern states soaring to the high forties (48C = 118F). As of tonight, there are still 31 bushfires out of control in scrub (that is, wild countryside) across Victoria. Since Saturday, many of the fires have changed direction with the shifting winds and several have hit not just outlying farms and the farmers' homes but entire townships, which have been ravaged by the flames. So far, there have been at least 135 people confirmed dead and many, many more are missing. Hundreds of people have lost their homes and others have no idea what will be left to return to after the fires eventually burn out.

So now, I would like you to stop reading, and pray. Please pray for safety for the people whose homes are endangered, and for wisdom for them to know whether to stay and when to leave. Please pray for firefighters who are working tirelessly across the state to bring the fires under control, and for those in the weather bureau who are monitoring temperature and wind conditions, that they shall be able to give the best advice in the necessary time. Above all, please pray that as people come face-to-face with their lack of control over all they hold dear, that they may turn to the one true God, who is Sovereign over all, who has provided the only sure hope by which anyone may face death with eager expectancy, rather than fear.

[Bushfire image from the ABC's online bushfire reporting. Praying hands image from sxc.]