The following resource is from desiring God.org.

Let's pray together.

Father, my heart's desire tonight is that, in part because of what we do here now together there would be no

wasted lives in this room and in the hearing of my voice and there would be no wasted deaths.

I pray that you would bring a significance and a power and a meaning to the lives in this

room and I pray that you would use that significance and power and meaning to make every death count for

your glory.

Whether it happens quickly or whether it happens 50 or 60 years from now. I pray Lord that if we're not able to trade in our pain or shame or suffering in this life, we would not postpone the joy, but rather find it in the pain, in the shame, in the suffering. So come now and help me to make your word plain.

Grip, I pray, these young people, and don't let them waste their lives.

In Jesus, name I pray, amen.

So here we are gathered on the 29th of December 2003,

and the body count as we meet from the earthquake in BAM Iran is at about 25,000.

That's a lot of human lives snuffed out at 528 in the morning.

And you feel the personal weight of it when you read about a father digging through the blocks of his house

looking for a daughter and a wife and uncovering a dead hand and passing out for

grief. When you read about a little baby being found alive in the grip of a dead

mother, puts a face on it, and what makes this event here at the end of 2003 feels so apocalyptic for some of us is not the

magnitude of it, though it's 10 times bigger than 9-11.

But how many other events were packed together with it, right?

13 people buried in a mud slide in California,

six buried under an avalanche in Utah,

111 dead in a plane crash in Benin, 198 dead in poison from gas in China, all packed

...