She was tall for her age, which probably made it easier for gunman Larry Gene Ashbrook to target her on that horrific night a decade ago at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Cursing God and Baptists, he stormed into a youth prayer service, firing 100 rounds and exploding a pipe bomb — leaving seven dead and seven wounded.

At a recent meeting of the Wedgwood deacons, Cassie’s father gave his pastor a message for the faithful at the First Baptist in Maryville, Ill., where another disturbed gunman killed the senior pastor while he preached on Sunday, March 8.

“Let those people know that my son is still struggling,” the deacon told the Rev. Al Meredith, who preached to the stricken Maryville flock exactly one week after their pastor’s death.

This kind of tragedy, said Meredith, is not “something you get over with three points and a poem,” a dose of scripture, a verse of “Victory in Jesus” and a proclamation that, “Everything’s fine. Let’s move on.”

There’s a “Greek word” for that kind of theology and it’s “baloney,” he said, preaching where the Rev. Fred Winters bled and died, his Bible blasted apart by one of 27-year-old Terry Joe Sedlacek’s first shots. Police have not announced a motive.

“Every day with Jesus is not sweeter than the day before,” said Meredith, in a sermon that swung from tears to gospel singing to laughter. “Some days are evil. In fact, the Bible says, ‘Stand that you might be able to stand in the evil day.’ Last Sunday was an evil day, and our hearts are breaking. …

“People are going to ask, ‘When are you going to get over this?’ You’re never going to get over this, but by God’s grace you’re going to get through it. And God will give you joy and peace in the midst of it, in the midst of the tears and the heartache. Have you learned that? You are learning it. It’s the praise you give with a broken heart that is the greatest sacrifice you can offer God.”

There are few pastors who have faced the challenge of preaching in a sanctuary that has blood on the carpet and bullet holes in the walls. There are few who have had to face the press after this kind of bloodshed, with most of the reporters asking an ancient question that is at the heart of mature faith: “Can you tell us where God is in all of this?”

Meredith, of course, addressed that question when he faced his own shell-shocked flock. That’s why the Maryville church asked him to come preach.

Back in 1999, he said: “If God really loves us, if God is all powerful, why in the world did he let this happen? Why does God allow evil to seemingly abound in this world? Why Columbine? … Why do a million and a half unborn babies have their lives snuffed out before they have a chance to breathe a breath? Why do children die of hunger daily around the world? Why is there pain? Why is there suffering? Why is there mental illness? … The question is, ‘Where is God when we hurt?’ “

The reality is that there is no way to avoid suffering. Thus, the crucial test is whether believers can face trials and tribulations without sliding in despair.

Meanwhile, said Meredith, far too many churches are fighting about the “color of the carpet or the music they sing,” while suffering people keep looking for some sense of hope — in this world and the next. It doesn’t help that anyone with a television remote can find scores of “health and wealth boys” who claim that true believers will avoid pain and strife altogether.

“Tell that to every saint that’s died. Tell that to the saints that are struggling with unmitigated pain,” he told the Maryville congregation. “God never promised us a life without trials. As Americans, we want a carefree and happy life. We think that’s God’s will for our lives. Get a clue. God’s will for your life is to make you into the image of His Son, and that only happens through the heartaches and trials of life.”

You know the shoe I’m talking about — the religion shoe. When the Virginia Tech University story broke, you began clicking from website to website, channel to channel, seeking information and, then, something more.

You’ve seen photos of mourners in pews, offering comfort and seeking solace. You know that believers will pray and that journalists will keep aiming cameras at them, because, that?s what Bible Belt people do. People in southwest Virginia put scriptures on big road signs and build huge crosses next to Interstate highways. They pray. It’s a good photo, but it’s just prayer. Right?

No, you’re waiting for a real religion angle to surface, a crazy one linked to violence and power. After all, religion surfaces in so many bloody stories these days.

Plus, you know there are politicos here inside the Beltway who are sitting, TV remotes in their hands, waiting to grade the candidates. Will Barack Obama get the tone right, with the right mixture of scripture and concern? Will Hillary Clinton look chilly? Will anyone in the GOP herd look both presidential and pastoral?

You know the pope will say something and that — no matter what he says about the mysteries of life and death, good and evil — it will appear in news reports as a naive cry for peace and for an end to violence.

Then again, journalists know that the Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is up I-81 from Blacksburg. So maybe he’ll come to Virginia Tech and talk about jealousy, broken hearts and the sexual revolution. Or maybe Pat Robertson will say — something, anything. Then, on the other side, perhaps the atheist version of Robertson could call a press conference and say this tragedy is more evidence that life is random and without purpose. That would work.

You’re waiting to find out what video game the shooter played all hours of the day and night. Did he go to see the movie “300” one too many times? Was he driven by Satan or too many “Left Behind” novels? People on both sides of the sacred vs. secular divide need to know.

You’re waiting to see if he killed more women than men. You want to know if the big massacre started in the classroom of an evangelical professor who once witnessed to the shooter and made him mad. You heard reporters say the shooter was Asian and you immediately thought: Asia? What part of Asia? What religion was he?

You’re waiting for something that points toward the source of this evil. Am I right? And if you remember the Columbine High School massacre, you may be thinking of that column that journalist Peggy Noonan — a traditional Catholic — wrote about the “culture of death” hours after that hellish day.

She wrote: “Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio. … The waves contain words like this, which I’ll limit to only one source, the news:

“… took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired … said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide … is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens … court battle over who owns the frozen sperm … contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women … died of lethal injection … had threatened to kill her children. … had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself … protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism … showed no remorse … which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student … which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiance…

“This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.”

You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. You want to know the eternal “why” in “who, what, when, where, why and how.”

I know that I do.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines this term as a “vindication of God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.” Wikipedia calls it a “branch of theology … that attempts to reconcile

the existence of evil in the world with the assumption of a benevolent God.”

There were three “theodicy” events in 2005, so the Religion Newswriters Association combined them into one item in its top-10 story list. What linked Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asia tsunami and another earthquake in Pakistan? Each time, journalists asked the timeless question: What role did God play in these disasters?

Last year, it was the schoolhouse massacre of five Amish girls in Bart Township, Pa. The stunning words of forgiveness offered by the families of the victims added yet another layer of drama to the story.

“Every year there is going to be some great tragedy or disaster and that causes people to ask, ‘Where was God?’ These events may not seem like religion stories, but they almost always turn into religion stories because of the way people respond to them,” said Richard N. Ostling, who retired last year after three decades on the religion beat, first with Time and then with the Associated Press.

“This tells us something important — that it’s hard to draw clean lines between what is religion news and what is not. … Religious faith is part of how people think and how they live. This affects all kinds of things.”

This is true in Iran and in Israel. It’s true on Sunday mornings in American suburbs and during riots in the suburbs of France. It’s true on the border between India and Pakistan and numerous other fault lines around the world.

Religion is a factor when people go to worship or when they decline to do so. For many, faith plays a role when they vote and when they volunteer to help others. Sadly, religion often plays a pivotal role when people go to war.

Thus, noted Ostling, events on this beat often seem to go in circles, with certain themes and conflicts appearing year after year, world without end — amen.

This is frustrating for editors, who struggle to understand why religious believers “keep getting so upset about what seem to be the same old stories,” he said.

For example, mainline Protestants have been fighting for decades over hot-button issues linked to ancient doctrines about marriage, gender and sex. More often than not, this leads to headlines about another round of changes in the U.S. Episcopal Church. One of the major stories of 2006 was the election of the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori — an articulate feminist from the tiny Diocese of Nevada — as the denomination’s first female presiding bishop.

“This was an important story,” noted Ostling. “But was there anything all that surprising about it? Not really.” Meanwhile, the bigger story — a chain reaction among parishes leaving the denomination — is “probably harder to cover because it is spread all over the country,” he said.

The fall of the Rev. Ted Haggard as president of the National Association of Evangelicals was a big story in 2006, but the typical news year always includes at least one sexy scandal of this kind.

The list goes on. Every election year will include a wave of reports about the degree to which religious issues did or did not drive Republicans, and increasingly Democrats, to the polls.

There are annual stories that pit science against religion and Hollywood against people in pews. Can journalists separate politics and faith in the Middle East? Are clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq about religious faith, political power or some combination of the two? What will the pope say that upsets people this year? Which church-state case split the U.S. Supreme Court this time around?

“The problem is that it’s hard to know if any one event in this stream of events is the definitive one, the truly landmark event,” said Ostling. “At some point, things change and they stay changed.”

But journalists have to be patient, he said, because “people are looking for answers to the big questions and they don’t change what they believe overnight.”

The Rev. Joe McKeever is the missions director for a Southern Baptist regional association, which is rather like being bishop of a flock that doesn’t believe in bishops. This means that he gets asked to pray even more than the next guy with a Bible.

McKeever says yes — on one condition. Before the prayer, he insists on delivering a mini-sermon he calls, “What New Orleans and Heaven Have In Common.” McKeever, you see, leads the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans.

“Obviously, people in heaven and in New Orleans love the saints,” he said, reached by a shaky cell-phone link in Mississippi. “Both places love a party, since heaven always has a good reason to party and New Orleans doesn’t need a reason.” And then there’s I-10, an interstate highway that will “get you to either place really quick, if you aren’t careful.”

But the 65-year-old McKeever always slips in something serious. There’s a truth about New Orleans he wants other believers to grasp, especially as many of Hurricane Katrina’s victims prepare to rebuild.

The other reason heaven and New Orleans are alike, he said, is a “simple matter of diversity. Both places are made up of people from every nation under the sun. … Whenever I hear people say they want to reach the world for Jesus Christ, I tell them to come to New Orleans — it’s already here.”

Life is a blur right now, which is understandable since McKeever’s office address is 2222 Lakeshore Drive and the shore in question belongs to Lake Pontchartrain. Before Katrina, he worked with 77 congregations and 63 missions in Orleans and Jefferson parishes and the thin arc of towns south on the Mississippi River.

Many of these churches are fine since they’re in the suburbs and exurbs around the flooded bowl that is New Orleans. But some of the sanctuaries are in bad shape or ruined. It’s easy to imagine conditions at the Dixieland Trailer Park Mission. After the storm, McKeever’s office spent hours trying to find the pastors of his 60 missions and drew a blank, since they are scattered across the nation.

McKeever said he has been overjoyed at the outpouring of support for Katrina’s victims, especially from religious groups nationwide. He is convinced that most of the help and the more than $500 million in charity donations are coming from people who acted for religious motivations. He can’t prove that, but he believes it.

More volunteers from a wide variety of churches and other faith groups are poised to rush into New Orleans once they get an all-clear signal to do so. Early this week, Southern Baptist Convention leaders reported that their volunteers had already served about 2 million meals along the ravaged Gulf Coast.

When all is said and done, McKeever believes that New Orleans will be flooded again — this time with compassion. Many of the walls that have long divided church people in the region were, quite literally, ripped down, he said.

This would be remarkable since Southerners have highly mixed feelings about the Big Easy. They consider it a strange, glorious, corrupt and soulful city, a place where demons dance right out in the open and more than a few of the saints, when they do come marching in, are drunk. As former New York Times editor Howell Raines said recently, in highest praise, New Orleans is the “one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled.”

McKeever has seen that side of the city. As a seminarian, he volunteered for street-preaching duty in the French Quarter. But he said he has decided that there is more to the Crescent City than revelry, voodoo, alcohol and temptation. There are the believers in a wide variety of pews who have found their place in its unique cultural gumbo.

“Someone told me before we moved here that to be a true Christian in New Orleans was different from the Bible Belt,” he said. “They said that sin was so black here that believers shine like diamonds against a jeweler’s black velvet. I’ve frequently thought the Christianity I’ve seen here, far from being the weak kind outsiders expect in such a city, is actually of a purer variety for this very reason.”

Families are large and disease common, affecting young and old. Terrorism and tribal conflicts in this culture often lead to violence, injury and death.

“Someone will say, ‘My brother died last night,’ and he will say it as a simple statement of fact,” said Father Stephen Noll, vice chancellor of this Anglican Church of Uganda school. “Someone may report that a particular student will not be returning to class because he was killed in an ambush by the ‘Army of God.’ “

It took time for Noll to adjust, after leaving his post as dean of an American seminary to help support the growing churches in Africa. He watched the faithful face so much pain and loss without losing faith in a compassionate and just God.

“It’s not that they don’t grieve,” he said. “They know — as a common fact of life — that bad things happen to good people. They accept that in the context of their faith.”

Thus, Third World believers may wonder why leaders in privileged lands such as Great Britain and the United States have been so quick to point angry fingers at the heavens following the Indian Ocean tsunami.

For example, Anglican leaders in Uganda were surprised by this headline in the Sunday Telegraph in London: “Archbishop of Canterbury — this has made me question God’s existence.” The online version was just as blunt: “Of course this makes us doubt God’s existence.”

Press officers for Archbishop Rowan Williams protested that these headlines radically oversimplified the truths that the theologian and poet had tried to communicate in his complex, candid tsunami essay. Critics had focused on his statement that it was wrong for Christians not to doubt the goodness, or even the existence, of the biblical God in the face of 157,000 deaths.

“Every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers,” wrote Williams. “Faced with the paralyzing magnitude of a disaster like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged. … The question: ‘How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?’ is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t — indeed, it would be wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so far.”

Meanwhile, religious believers in violent and impoverished parts of the world often find comfort and coherence in the traditional answers of their faiths. Noll stressed that it would be wrong to oversimplify this. Nevertheless, he thought Ugandan responses to the tsunami were revealing.

“For God the issue of dying is not as tragic as it is to us because whether dead or alive we are still in his presence,” said Father Grace Kaiso, spokesman for the Uganda Joint Christian Council. “God whispers to us in times of peace and shouts to us in times of tragedy and unfortunately we pay more attention when he shouts. So through the tsunamis he was shouting to us and awakened us to the reality of death, which can come suddenly, of his power and of his salvation which we should take advantage of.”

Imam Kasozi of Uganda’s Muslim Youth Assembly responded: “God does what he wants to do. If people are not responding to his call of upright living, he will punish them. … When God sends punishment, it does not discriminate between wrongdoers and the upright ones. This incident was two-way in that the wrongdoers were punished and the upright people who were doing God’s will were taken early to heaven.”

The key, said Noll, is that many in the West tend to question the sovereignty of God, preferring a “weakened God or a mystical God or no God at all” to an omnipotent God who permits disasters.

“People in traditional societies,” said Noll, “face quandaries of God’s justice daily with the death of a relative from AIDS … or a crazed insurgent and they lean in the direction of accepting disasters as God’s sovereign will. They also have a more vivid belief in the afterlife. While they mourn the loss of life, they console themselves that God’s justice will be vindicated in the end.”

You wrestle with metal shutters. You fill bathtubs and rows of plastic bottles with water and make extra ice. You check radios, flashlights and battery expiration dates.

Floridians in Frances evacuation zones faced the sobering act of preparing a box or two of irreplaceable papers, pictures and memories. I saved stacks of class outlines and left textbooks. I saved icons from Greece and left diplomas from Texas. I saved my guitar and an oil painting of the great lion Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia. Some things are easier to replace than others.

Then you are supposed to pray.

Even our civic officials and television anchors hinted at this. But for what, precisely, should we pray? This is a puzzle for learned theologians, as well as parents guiding children in bedtime prayers next to a hurricane lamp.

Should believers pull a Pat Robertson and try to steer the storm toward some other target more worthy of God’s wrath? Is it realistic to pray that every storm will veer into the open Atlantic? Many simply pray for God’s will to be done — period.

Deep questions loom overhead: Does God “cause,” “control” or merely “allow” hurricanes? Are they part of a fallen creation touched by sin, yet events that God can use? All of the above?

“I don’t think you can hold that God never sends the storm — the witness of scripture seems to forbid that,” said Father Joseph Wilson of St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Whitestone, N.Y., one of several experts I reached by email during the storm.

“The Fall had consequences and scripture hints at them. These consequences affected man’s relationship with God, his relationship with woman and with nature. … In classical Christian theology it is not necessarily the active will of God, which sends the storm, although it may be. But the permissive will of God is involved, since He is permitting it.”

Roman Catholics have long wrestled with these issues in liturgies, he said. The altar missal includes a rich variety of “Masses for Various Needs,” including prayers about the weather and harvests. The “Procession for Averting Tempest” begins with church bells, a litany of the saints and the following:

“Almighty and ever living God, spare us in our anxiety and take pity on us in our abasement, so that after the lightning in the skies and the force of the storm have calmed, even the very threat of tempest may be an occasion for us to offer You praise. Lord Jesus, Who uttered a word of command to the raging tempest of wind and sea and there came a great calm: hear the prayers of Your family.”

Finally, the priest makes the sign of the cross and sprinkles the surroundings with holy water. At that point, quipped Wilson, “I guess everyone assumes the crash position.”

Specific Protestant rites are harder to come by. But in one Evangelical Lutheran Church in America liturgy, the people pray “Lord, have mercy” after prayers such as: “In the face of mighty winds, thunderous sounds, strong rains, and surging waves, let us pray. … In the face of complete uncertainty, as well as concern for our loved ones, here or elsewhere, let us pray. … In the face of our own vulnerable mortality, let us pray to the Lord.”

Eastern Orthodox tradition includes similar prayers, noted Father Patrick Henry Reardon of Chicago, the author of numerous meditations on the Book of Psalms. Hurricane Frances drew his immediate attention because his son’s family, with five grandchildren, was in its path.

The key is that it is always appropriate to “pray simply for deliverance, for yourself and for others,” he said. “During storms … I am particularly drawn toward Psalms 18 and 29, because both of them describe the experience of a storm, with all the wind, thunder (the ‘Voice of the Lord’), lightning and so forth.”

These timeless and mysterious prayers range from stark fear to exuberant praise. In them, storms are common — a normal challenge of life in biblical lands.

“It is legitimate to ask if a hurricane counts as a storm,” said Reardon. “I don’t know. However, I am disposed to think they will suffice.”