...

The Indonesian coastline as it used to be and then three days after the earthquake and tsunami hit. Pretty mind blowing eh? There's even the possibility that the quake was so massive that it's knocked the earth as much as an inch off orbit.

Flicking through the many pages on the BBC website it's impossible to take it all in, and that's just a watered down presentation of the reality. There's a good photojournal of Kodiyatu Sunimal, a Sri Lankan who survived the wave but lost everything.

I heard earlier that when the first media people arrived in Sri Lanka, people rushed up to them asking whether any other countries had been affected. We have wall-to-wall 24 hour coverage, they are in the midst of it and have little idea of the global enormity of it all but a very real knowledge of the individual, family and community effects. How many of us are feeling relieved it didn't happen here and yet the people most affected are asking how the rest of the world are.

And it's another one of those times that leaves us all, head in hands, thinking "What can I do?" Steve led some prayer stuff for it in church on Sunday which really made sense. He talked about the time when Jesus fed 5,000 with a kid's lunch pack - he took what must've seemed way too small and made it into more than enough. The kid could've just eaten his lunch, or maybe shared it with a few around him, but he couldn't ever have made it serve that many people. Not without Jesus. And that's what we have to do here - we have to offer what little we have, which for most of us, doesn't go much further than prayer and money, and let Jesus turn it into whatever he needs it to be.