Imagine being forced to stay inside from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. while living without electricity. That's the plight of millions in Puerto Rico today. Meanwhile, rescuers are digging through mountains of debris this morning searching for signs of life following Tuesday's earthquake that killed at least 282 people.

People in Texas and Florida are still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Maria or another hurricane could strike the US again. And seismologists are warning today that we are "overdue" for a catastrophic earthquake.

When disasters strike, it's human nature to ask why God allowed them and to wonder how he is relevant to our suffering. We know that some suffering results from misused freedom (Gen. 3:17–19) and that natural disasters are a consequence of the fall (Rom. 8:22). We know that future good can come from present pain (Rom. 8:18).

But there's another biblical fact worth remembering today: God hurts as we hurt. Why should we believe that this is true?

One: His revelation promises his compassion.

Our Lord assures us, "When you pass through waters, I will be with you" (Isa. 43:2). Our Father is all-knowing (Heb. 4:13), so he knows about our pain. And "God is love" (1 John 4:8b), so he hurts as we hurt.

Two: His relationship with us requires his compassion.

If Jesus is your Lord, you are the child of God (1 John 3:1). Now the Lord of the universe feels for you what parents feel for their children. When my older son went through cancer, and my younger son broke his leg playing basketball, I could not feel their physical pain as they did, but I felt a grief for their suffering that was deeper than any pain I have ever experienced. Every parent knows what I mean.

But the Spirit of God actually indwells our bodies (1 Cor. 3:16), meaning that our Father feels our physical pain as he grieves for our suffering. In this sense, he hurts even more than we do.

What does his presence in our pain mean for us today?

One: We are never alone.

Pain is the great isolator. People tell us, "I know how you feel," but they don't because they can't. But God can and does. No matter how lonely we feel, we are not alone.

Two: We always have what we need.

Our Father promises to give us whatever we need to withstand the trials we face (1 Cor. 10:13). His omnipotence is as near as your next prayer.

Now we have a choice. We can reject God's help because our finite, fallen minds do not understand his omniscient, sovereign ways. Or we can ask him for his empowering strength.

The only person who can keep you from experiencing the power and compassion of God is you.

(charismanews.com)

LEVITTOWN, PUERTO RICO — The winds had eased, the debris was no longer soaring through the air, the chaos had subsided. Elizabeth Serrano Roldan decided to lie in her bed and rest. In her gated, middle-class community in the San Juan suburbs, it appeared Hurricane Maria had finally passed.

Then came the water.

It was murky, and sudden, and it flowed into Serrano Roldan’s home with ferocity. Needing a wheelchair to get around, she was marooned on her mattress — her 82-year-old mother was similarly trapped nearby — as the water rose a foot, then two, then more. Her bed had become an island. There was no way out and no one heeding her pleas for help.

“We called and called and called,” Serrano Roldan said. “They promised to come, and nothing happened. It kept rising and rising and rising.”

She looked to the three crosses hanging over her bed, the painting of the Virgin María on the wall. And she prayed. No storm had ever done this here, not in this neighborhood. Hurricane Maria, it seemed, was coming to get her even after it was already gone.

Neighborhoods like this one across Puerto Rico have become disaster zones, the 100-mile island covered in detritus, destruction and despair. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 24 hours after the strong hurricane’s eye had cleared out, the scope of Maria’s damage was still unknown. Much of the U.S. territory remained without power — and could lack electricity for months. Communications were in many places nonexistent.

The information that did trickle out Thursday included images of downed power lines, caved-in buildings and streets blanketed in choppy brown water. Roofs in the capital of San Juan were torn apart, leaving the interiors open to the elements. Enormous trees were pulled from the ground by their roots, and forests were stripped of their leaves.

Stark images and grave news also emerged out of other islands battered by Maria. In the island nation of Dominica, the prime minister said Thursday that at least 15 were confirmed dead and 20 more were missing in the wake of the storm, according to the Associated Press.

A car sits in the middle of a flooded street in Levittown, Puerto Rico. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)

Here in Levittown, one of the largest planned communities in Puerto Rico, the flooding was triggered after authorities opened the gates to the Rio de la Plata, in the center of the island, to bring water levels down. The action caused an artificial lake to overflow about 8 or 9 p.m. Wednesday, flooding the community of thousands and trapping residents in their homes.

Early Thursday, emergency management teams and the National Guard rescued dozens of residents, taking them to nearby shelters. But many more remained stuck in their homes with almost no cellphone reception, some of them waiting on their rooftops.

More than 30 neighbors rushed to the two-story house where Serrano Roldan lives with her mother. The neighbors, many of them elderly, needed to find higher ground, and the Roldan family’s home was the only one on the block with a second floor. The women welcomed them.

As the neighbors sought refuge in the three small rooms upstairs, along with their five dogs, Serrano Roldan stayed downstairs, in her bed. Serrano Roldan has spinal muscular atrophy and uses a wheelchair; she must be lowered into her accessible bed with a crane.

With the waters swiftly rising around her on the first floor, she prayed: “Thy will be done.”

In front of her, sleeping on a lower bed, even closer to the rising water, was her mother, Anna Roldan, weeping.

“I couldn’t leave her,” the mother said.

Elizabeth Serrano Roldan, left, and Vicente Sanabria survived the flood together at a house in Levittown with other neighbors. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)

As the sun rose, the water began to slowly pull away, allowing the neighbors to start filtering back to their homes. Residents assessed the damage. Many found all of their belongings — their furniture, their cars — destroyed from the floodwater.

The flooding was a shock to Levittown residents, not only because it was unexpected but because it was unlike anything the neighborhood had experienced. It is the largest housing development in the Toa Baja municipality, and historically, it had been considered safe from hurricanes. Residents across Levittown said their homes had never before flooded.

By midday Thursday, some of the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents still hadn’t found a way out of their wet, damaged homes.

Serrano Roldan sat in her doorway in her waterlogged, inoperable wheelchair. She was stuck, sweating in the humid, wet home, with a bandage wrapped around an open vein on her right wrist.

The gray-haired woman, a college professor at the University of Puerto Rico, was recently diagnosed with bronchitis and sepsis. Before the storm made landfall, she had been receiving IV treatment from a home nurse. She desperately needed to be taken to a hospital but could no longer make calls on her landline.

Her mother reached over to her, trying to feed her a bologna sandwich.

“I don’t have an appetite right now,” she said. “Nothing.”

Her mother, who has severe arthritis, walked slowly through the first level of the home, assessing the damage. In the bedroom, where Serrano Roldan’s butterfly collection lines the walls, nearly everything was lost. All of their clothes, dressers, bedding, all of the machines Serrano Roldan uses to get around on a daily basis, soaked in the floodwater.

“Oh my God,” the mother said.

Thursday happened to be her 82nd birthday.

Puerto Rico, home to 3.5 million U.S. citizens, was still getting pelted by Maria’s outer bands Thursday as search-and-rescue operations began. The heavy rains sparked dangerous flash floods, particularly in more remote mountainous areas, which the National Hurricane Center called “catastrophic” and “life-threatening.”

The poor conditions complicated efforts to assess the full scope of damage, though authorities in Puerto Rico are already estimating that the cost could reach into the billions.

President Trump acknowledged the likelihood of severe damage. The island is in “very, very, very perilous shape,” Trump told reporters in New York during a meeting with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko.

Across the continental United States, people pleaded for information about their loved ones on the island, sending panicked messages on social media and dialing and dialing and dialing, getting nothing but silence or busy signals.

About 5 million Puerto Ricans live on the U.S. mainland, including 700,000 in New York City and more than a million in Florida.

“People are begging for information,” Vanessa Pahucki, a teacher in New York, wrote in an email. She has not yet heard from her uncle, who is in Naguabo, on the eastern side of the island. Pahucki started a Facebook group called Loved Ones in Puerto Rico — Check In, where people are asking for updates about areas where loved ones live, and where people on the island are sharing videos.

Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.) hasn’t heard from her five siblings in Yabucoa. She did speak to a sister near San Juan who lost her home when a nearby river flooded.

“It’s terrible, but it’s the story,” she said. “We’re just getting so many phone calls. People are desperate because they don’t know. They don’t know the whereabouts, they don’t know if they are fine, and it’s terrible. This is unprecedented. This is beyond the imagination of everyone.”

Hurricane Maria passed through Puerto Rico leaving behind a path of destruction across the national territory. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)

Waiting with Serrano Roldan and her mother were a married couple, Barbara Terreforte and Vicente Sanabria, the last of the Levittown neighbors that had sought refuge in the home. They are both in their mid-70s, and Sanabria has diabetes.

They sat by the front door, wondering how they might get out of there. The roads were still flooded, and the only means of escape would be in a large SUV.

Terreforte’s daughter had managed to walk more than an hour to check on her parents. Around the neighborhood, scores of other Puerto Ricans trudged through knee-deep waters to check on their relatives.

With no cellphone reception, it was nearly impossible for families to communicate. Some of the Levittown residents were in shelters, but many others were still in their homes. Families drove around with their windows open, asking locals if they had seen their aunts, parents or friends. Others, on the mainland and around the world, posted messages on Facebook and Twitter. They posted coordinates, house numbers and names of their relatives in Levittown, asking authorities to please help rescue them.

Terreforte’s daughter went to fetch an SUV to try to bring her parents to safety. But Terreforte didn’t want to leave Roldan and her daughter behind.

“How do you know someone will come get you?” Terreforte asked.

“Go, don’t stay here. You’ll be safer there,” Roldan said. “We’ll find someone.”

Then, minutes later, a white SUV pulled into the driveway. It was a family friend, who had heard from Serrano Roldan’s daughter in Florida that her mother and grandmother were stranded in Levittown. The family friend offered to drive the mother and daughter to a hospital for Serrano Roldan to receive the treatment she needed.

A man carries Elizabeth Serrano Roldan nto a SUV to drive her to a hospital. (Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/For The Washington Post)

Somashekhar and Zezima reported from Washington. Daniel Cassady in San Juan, and Ed O’Keefe and the Capital Weather Gang in Washington contributed to this report.

(The Washington Post)

TOKYO — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has warned President Trump that he will make the U.S. leader “pay dearly” for his threat to totally destroy North Korea, in an unusual direct and angry statement published Friday.

Calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and his speech to the U.N. General Assembly “unprecedented rude nonsense,” Kim said that he was now thinking hard about how to respond.

“I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the U.S. pay dearly for his speech,” Kim said in a statement released by the official Korean Central News Agency, which also published a photo of the North Korean leader sitting at his desk holding a piece of paper.

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Kim Jong Un just released a statement calling Trump a "mentally deranged U.S. dotard" who will "pay dearly" for his U.N. speech

5:35 PM - Sep 21, 2017

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“I am now thinking hard about what response he could have expected when he allowed such eccentric words to trip off his tongue. Whatever Trump might have expected, he will face results beyond his expectation,” Kim said, saying that he would “tame” Trump “with fire.”

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Thursday night that the North’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, said in New York that his country may test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean to fulfill Kim’s vow to take the “highest-level” action against the United States.

“It could be the most powerful detonation of an H-bomb in the Pacific,” Ri said. “We have no idea about what actions could be taken as it will be ordered by leader Kim Jong Un.”

U.S. officials believe the North carried out its first hydrogen bomb test on Sept. 3.

In his maiden address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump called Kim “Rocket Man” and said that his administration was prepared to defend the country and its allies if Kim continued to threaten the United States and to destabilize East Asia.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself.”

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Dotard: a person exhibiting a decline in mental faculties; a weak-minded or foolish old person.http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dotard?s=t …

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Here is the full statement published by KCNA on Friday morning:

Statement of Chairman of State Affairs Commission of DPRK

Pyongyang, September 22 (KCNA) — Respected Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, released a statement on Thursday.

The full text of the statement reads:

The speech made by the U.S. president in his maiden address on the UN arena in the prevailing serious circumstances, in which the situation on the Korean peninsula has been rendered tense as never before and is inching closer to a touch-and-go state, is arousing worldwide concern.

Shaping the general idea of what he would say, I expected he would make stereo-typed, prepared remarks a little different from what he used to utter in his office on the spur of the moment as he had to speak on the world's biggest official diplomatic stage.

But, far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defusing tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors.

A frightened dog barks louder.

I'd like to advise Trump to exercise prudence in selecting words and to be considerate of whom he speaks to when making a speech in front of the world.

The mentally deranged behavior of the U.S. president openly expressing on the UN arena the unethical will to “totally destroy” a sovereign state, beyond the boundary of threats of regime change or overturn of social system, makes even those with normal thinking faculty think about discretion and composure.

His remarks remind me of such words as “political layman” and “political heretic” which were in vogue in reference to Trump during his presidential election campaign.

After taking office Trump has rendered the world restless through threats and blackmail against all countries in the world. He is unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country, and he is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician.

His remarks which described the U.S. option through straightforward expression of his will have convinced me, rather than frightening or stopping me, that the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.

Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy the DPRK, we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.

Action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is uttering only what he wants to say.

As a man representing the DPRK and on behalf of the dignity and honor of my state and people and on my own, I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the U.S. pay dearly for his speech calling for totally destroying the DPRK.

This is not a rhetorical expression loved by Trump.

I am now thinking hard about what response he could have expected when he allowed such eccentric words to trip off his tongue.

Whatever Trump might have expected, he will face results beyond his expectation.

I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.

The U.S. and Russia are backing separate campaigns to wipe out the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in its final stronghold of Deir ez-Zor, in eastern Syria. As the rival powers and their allies close in on jihadists, however, an international rivalry escalates, and seemingly natural obstacles grow increasingly suspect.

With support from Russia and Iran, the Syrian military has broken a three-year ISIS siege on fellow soldiers trapped in Deir ez-Zor and beaten the militants back across the Euphrates river that divides the city. As Syrian troops advanced Tuesday, however, Moscow has accused the nearby U.S-led coalition campaign against ISIS of deliberately raising the river's water levels using dams located within territory held by the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a mostly Kurdish coalition of Arabs and ethnic minorities, to frustrate the Syrian military offensive.

"The water situation on the Euphrates has deteriorated dramatically in the past 24 hours. As soon as the Syrian government troops began to cross the river, the water level in the Euphrates rose within hours, and the current velocity nearly doubled to two meters per second," Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov told the state-run Tass, the Russian news agency.

"Since there have been no rains, the only source of such changes in the water situation is man-induced water discharge at dams upstream the Euphrates. These facilities are held by opposition groups controlled by the U.S.-led coalition," he stressed.

A Syrian army soldier takes a picture of the Euphrates river in al-Bugilia, north of Deir ez-Zor, Syria, on September 21. Omar Sanadiki/Reuters

The U.S.-led campaign, known as Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve, told Newsweek in a statement Thursday that "a number of factors will impact the water levels in the river, but we are not aware of any direct intervention by the coalition or our partner forces." The People's Protection Units, a Kurdish militia that forms much of the Syrian Democratic Forces, also denied any involvement and said it "did not notice any water level change" in a statement sent Friday to Newsweek.

Meanwhile, "mystery" fires broke out Thursday in the nearby Koniko gas field, the largest of its kind in Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitor with ties to Syria's exiled opposition. The group said it had not yet determined the source of the fires but noted that the Syrian military was clashing with ISIS a little more than three miles away, and the Syrian Democratic Forces were posted about eight miles away. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported Tuesday that Syrian troops were attempting to take the field, but neither side has claimed responsibility for the fires.

The U.S.-led coalition confirmed to Newsweek Thursday that the U.S. and partner forces were "aware of the fires in the vicinity of the Koniko gas field" but denied playing any role in them, or having any knowledge of how they started or what was being done to extinguish the blaze.

Possession of Syria's lucrative oil fields, once a cornerstone of ISIS's international financial network, has fueled a competition between forces looking to establish a strong stake in Syria's future.

Smoke rises as Syrian army soldiers stand near a checkpoint in Deir ez-Zor, Syria, on September 21. Omar Sanadiki/Reuters

Mistrust between the dueling campaigns by the world's two leading military powers recently spilled into violence. After the Syrian Democratic Forces said Saturday it had come under fire by the Syrian military with Russian air support, Russia accused the Syrian Democratic Forces of firing on its own positions Thursday. Both sides deny involvement in perpetrating either incident, but Konashenkov said that any further provocations would "be immediately suppressed with all military means."

Russia also accused the U.S. Wednesday of coordinating with jihadists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group once known as the Nusra Front and still widely believed to retain its Al-Qaeda ties, for a surprise assault in the northeastern rebel-held governorate of Idlib. The U.S. once supported various armed groups trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2011, but after a rise in jihadist activity, Washington switched gears to the Syrian Democratic Forces.

The Syrian government and the Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces both oppose ISIS, other jihadists and Turkish-backed rebels still trying to oust Assad, but disagree over the path to stabilizing the war-torn country. Kurds, bitter over what they consider to be political and cultural oppression by Assad's government, seek greater autonomy in the north, while the Syrian government and its supporters have criticized the Kurds' coordination with the U.S. and have called for absolute power to be restored to Assad.

(Yahoo News / Newsweek)