A Place of Safety

What a week. Houston - America's 4th largest city - still has large areas without power, much of Galveston was seriously damaged, the Bolivar Peninsula was pretty much wiped off the map, and it doesn't even make the news.

On Sunday, before the week's market convulsions, we sang a song* that included the line:

Lead us to a place, guide us with Your grace to a place where we'll be safe.

The images that that line evoked at the time were of weather - wind and rain and rising water - and in the shadow of September 11, of opportunities lost, and what would really make us safe. I started a posting about that, but I didn't get very far.

Then on Monday the market dived, and with every passing day the scale and scope of what was happening became clearer and more frightening. At this point, only six days later, "a safe place" means a place where you can invest your money without exposure to mortgage-derived securities.

What we heard this week is that credit is suddenly tight in a way that threatens normal functioning of our economy. Businesses that are sound are having trouble borrowing, and things are much tighter for mortgages and car loans. Walking around the neighborhood, I see the houses under construction (almost all of them Large Houses that are Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses) and wonder what all this means for the people who are building them.

Tom had a conversation with a builder who lived across the street until recently. He had been to his bank and had been told that he was the only builder that the bank did business with who had not defaulted on something. That was before the market dived, before the credit markets dried up.

So - here we are. A place where we'll be safe sounds really good. Leaders who could help us get there would be even better. And a strategy other than (or in addition to) prayer - well, that would be priceless.

*The Prayer, with Lead Us, Lord by Carole Sager and David Foster