C.S. Lewis on Katrina

I think it was Dostoyevsky who once noted that humans are three dimensional beings in a four dimensional universe, meaning there is a dimension only God's mind can comprehend. Devastating events like 9/11 and Katrina always seem to generate discussion of the "How could God let this happen?" question. Our small human minds may be unable to arrive at a satisfying answer, but I find C. S. Lewis' explanation to be as good as anyone could formulate:

That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you concede everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you would have no game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

The Problem of Pain, P. 21-22