ON THE AUSTRALIAN FIRES

CHANNING WALKER

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

"IT COMES AT YOU like a runaway train. One minute you are preparing. The next you are fighting for your home. Then you are fighting for your life," wrote a longtime Australian reporter who found himself in the midst of the bush fires he was covering (quoted in the Los Angeles Times, February 9). It's a message that repeats again and again in news reports: At unbelievable speeds walls of flame raced across the landscape and overwhelmed individuals who perhaps thought they were ready to battle a blaze, but found themselves overmatched.

Conditions on the ground could hardly have been worse. Years of drought have left the brush bone-dry. Temperatures last weekend [February 7, 8] reached a record 118 degrees F. in Melbourne. Many of the hardest-hit areas lay in remote, thinly populated zones, and therefore didn't top the lists of overstretched fire crews. And then, sadly, there's evidence that acts of arson apparently set the whole disaster in motion.

Amid the wreckage, is there any spark of hope? Maybe so. Try this, even if you live far from the blaze, even if you're on another continent. Test how long it takes for your thought to shift from your own concerns to the burned-out region. Less than a moment. Thought "travels" thousands of miles in no time at all. Prayer—a holy form of thought that reaches out to the Almighty for hope and also reaches out to a ravaged region with that God-born hope—travels that far, that fast.

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