Incoming?

The gift of life is a terrible thing to waste, even, or maybe especially, at 2:26 a.m. when Nature insists on having its/her way, and you notice bright flashes of lightning over the Gulf of Mexico way out front beyond the Bay and Shell Island. The following thunder is mute and much delayed, and as it seems to be shifting slowly east, I reckon there’s not much chance of a wonderful early summer morning thunderstorm. I would go out on the upstairs front porch to enjoy, and did stick my head out, but the humidity discourages that notion.

For some reason this scenario of wee hours lightning and thunder always brings to mind the night about twenty years ago, when there was a hurricane in the Gulf, and we were having rain from it, little wind as I recall. Tracking westward for Pensacola, it was 45 miles due south of my bedroom according to the National Hurricane Center and Channel 13. As the upstairs wasn’t air conditioned at the time, the windows were open onto the front porch and the breeze was good. I so enjoyed that night that it’s up there a memory to be called on at will.

Getting back in bed and closing the eyes usually doesn’t work for me: it wasn’t “habit” until this summertime into fall four years ago when I was at the school dawn to dark five days a week, sometimes six, overseeing a rush project to make the Bill Lloyd Building presentable again so Bill could feel proud of it while there was time. I so wanted Bill to be happy with it and was in a great hurry with the project; but, still being sensible, practical, economy minded and cost conscious first and foremost, he was disapproving of the only contractor I could find to do what I wanted done immediately, which was extremely distressing! It was my “stupid time” actually, the angina was excruciating, but I didn’t want to worry Linda and didn’t know how to go about seeing a heart specialist. That all worked out, and one of many happy experiences of it, once I was “given two to five months to live” which in doctor code actually meant “any time” since I had been having the angina for about three years by then, was the sense, upon awaking in the wee hours for Nature, that this could be the day, and this the final early morning to enjoy, so don’t waste it, rise and relish. Yes, it got to be a habit, an enjoyable one that holds on, even though it often necessitates both a mid-morning and an afternoon nap.

But I’ve long been an early riser, including years of mornings starting thirty years ago last month, getting up to enjoy and love Apalachicola. I was usually up waiting for the roosters to start crowing all over town. Noisy creatures, they are.

This is my blog, not yours, to wander aimlessly if that’s what happens, nobody has to read it, I certainly do not read my nonsense, I just let the brain wander and the fingers dance. Actually, on waking I was thinking about The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord after reading one of the email meditations that arrives daily. Part of it is printed below ("Days of Praise", Institute for Creation Research). It’s been coming for years and even though as a onetime sometime amateur astronomer I think their literalist fundamentalist outlook is extremely naive and their God too small, the writers are scholars in Greek and Hebrew about which I know nothing, and I enjoy them. Besides, what do I know, innit. They could be right and I could be wrong, and probably are and am.

Here’s the extract.

The Dreadful Day of the Lord

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD.” (Malachi 4:5)

This is the next-to-last verse of the Old Testament and so marks the final mention in the Old Testament of the fearsome theme of the Day of the Lord. As the text says, it will be a “great and dreadful day.”

This phrase occurs frequently in the Bible, reminding us over and over again that although God is merciful and longsuffering, He will not remain silent forever. Man’s “day” will end someday, and the day of the Lord will come.

Note some of the other prophecies: “Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! . . . the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light” (Amos 5:18). “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD come” (Joel 2:31). “The great day of the LORD . . . is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness” (Zephaniah 1:14-15). “Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger” (Isaiah 13:9).

The phrase also is repeated in the New Testament, most awesomely of all in 2 Peter 3:10: “The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (see also 1 Thessalonians 5:2, etc.).

There’s no telling or knowing what’s going on outside us in the greater multiverse, but our own universe continues to expand from the Big Bang such that talk of it all ending with the imminent Great and Terrible Day of the Lord seems naive and primitive, the thinking of the Flat Earth and Blue Dome Age. But WTH do I know. The Day of the Lord could arrive in a meteorite.

There’s still that shabby peak at the south end of the building that didn’t get the white aluminum cladding because Bill was so frustrated with my contractor that we terminated him before he quite finished. No matter. Don't look up.

The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord seems much more likely to be a personal event than a universal cataclysm. But what do I know. The wrath of God could arrive in an incoming meteorite. Or, the windows of heaven actually could be opened to drown us all again. I'm good either way.