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As two small children were pulled gently from the ruins of their home, one observer marvelled that they were still breathing ten hours after the earthquake which devastated some of Italy’s historic hilltop towns. He concluded simply: ‘It’s an answer to prayer.’ A priest trapped in his house reckoned his own survival was ‘a great miracle.’ For many there was no such joy. Two young boys died along with their parents. Their grandmother said she blamed God: ‘He took them all at once’ - no answer to her prayers, or not one she would have wanted, certainly. And her understandable grief-filled response echoes centuries of agonising over the dilemma of innocent suffering, and the apparent absence of God. Few answers satisfy. Yet praying at a time of danger or great calamity can still seem natural, instinctive - even for people who don’t normally do such things, aren’t at all sure what they believe, and profess only the haziest idea of where they’re addressing their requests. It might just work, so why not give it a try? Desperation can be a powerful incentive. We heard it again on this programme yesterday, from another place piled high with rubble and grief. These were snatches of internet voice messages from people under siege in Aleppo. They’d seen their neighbours killed, their children going hungry, their community torn apart, and they lived in constant fear of shelling, and terror from the sky. All they wanted, said one woman, was an end to the bombing. ‘Please pray that it will stop,’ she pleaded with a relative in a place of comparative safety - someone who might well, like her, possess no influence with the bombers who terrify them, and their political masters. But at least she could join the appeal to a higher authority. And far from the horrors, this is one of the things any of us can do which could make a difference. It doesn’t demand any great piety: faith as a grain of mustard seed can move mountains, said Jesus. But where is God in it all? Or in any other situation of intense and seemingly pointless suffering? Wherever human beings are reflecting the character of a God who is loving, generous, forgiving, for sure. But that can only ever be part of the answer. The Christian faith invites us to pray, trusting that the God who knows about suffering from the inside - supremely in Jesus on the cross - wants good for people more passionately than we do, and shares the distress when that’s thwarted. A loving God is already involved. In the words of hymn writer Bishop Timothy Rees: ‘… when human hearts are breaking under sorrow’s iron rod, all the sorrow all the aching wrings with pain the heart of God.’