Pray, pray, pray for the people of Houston.  Their pain is almost unimaginable.  Pray for the relief workers, pray for the city, pray for continued assistance to those who need it.  It's difficult to know, beyond meterological explanation, why these things happen.  It's difficult to see any goodness in such hardship and suffering.  It's very taxing to try to make sense of such tragedy.
     Indeed, we never will.  Our minds are too small.  Like it or not, in the end we can only affirm the fact of God.  Nothing more, nothing less.  God is there.  I do not claim to understand everything about God (no one should), and I am not willing to say that this disaster is his plan.  This demeans God.  It demeans us, too.  God's free, and so are we. But we live in a broken world.  It's not a random world, however, and it's not a purposeless universe.  As to how we fit these things together, well, no one knows (or should realize that he or she doesn't know).
     Hence, however difficult it may be, and to echo my thoughts on Psalm 27 yesterday, we decide to trust God.  Otherwise, we will never be free.
     (Yet as anyone who has suffered deeply knows, though trusting God may be true, it will rarely provide total explanation and relief.  How fiendishly difficult is the faith journey, yet how inevitable its call is.)