I have spent much of this day in prayer for the folks living along the Red River, especially those in Fargo, Bismark, and Moorhead. Can you imagine frantically bagging sand to save your city and having to worry about the sand bags freezing before you can get them placed? Rock-hard sand does not make a tight dike.

In Fargo, you have a whole city and something on the order of 1,700 National Guardsmen working together to beat back a predicted flood stage higher than has been seen since 1897. May their valiant efforts be not in vain.

It makes me wonder how the folks of Cedar Rapids and all those living along the Iowa, Cedar, and Mississippi rivers who saw their livelihoods destroyed--and for some their towns wiped off the map--last summer are doing...

The current economic crisis has blanketed the news and our daily existence for months, causing us to forget about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are still trying to put the pieces of their lives back together. I suppose those flood victims are keeping a keen eye on North Dakota and Minnesota and praying that the flood threat there does not portent a heartbreaking spring and summer for a Midwest region that has to be rather weary of disaster.