Here are several practices ICTG staff, directors, advisors, and colleagues have found most useful following human-caused disasters that occur far away:
Spread love locally
- Gather together for prayer, singing, and lighting candles
- Spend the hours and days ahead expressing love to your loved ones
- Reach out to your neighbors with acts of goodness and kindness
- Extend acts of care to strangers you meet this week
- Give gifts locally, in honor of those who have been impacted by tragedy far away
Spread love throughout the country and the world
- Call a loved one or an old friend you haven't talked to in awhile to share how much you still care
- Gather with family and friends to create preparedness kits or to create care kits for a nonprofit that collects them and distributes them in immediate response to events like this one (find examples at NVOAD)
- Make a donation to your favorite nonprofit in honor of those who have died. ICTG and other faith-based denomination relief agencies use your monies to support local churches and communities most directly impacted. Rather than sending things, give to your denomination's relief agency and make a greater impact. (If you don't know if your denomination has a relief agency, now is a great time to find out.)
- Get educated. ICTG makes resources and training available online for ordained and lay ministers to access anywhere they have internet service, like resource guides for ministers, youth ministers, and spiritual directors, and congregational assessment guides and response go lists. Also, your donations help to subsidize the costs of these aids for low-income church and ministry leaders who look for them in the hours, days, and weeks after a tragedy like this one.
With these acts you get involved in countering terror locally and globally. These acts make a great difference.
Thank you for being a blessing.