The winds are rising.
You can trust me on this. I come from a long line of weather watchers, on my mother’s side of the family tree.
She grew up on a farm in southern Mississippi, where tornadoes made regular appearances and hurricanes, some years, cut savage swaths across the land. As a little girl, she used to watch her dad pace the floor, or slip out to the porch, late summer evenings when a storm was brewing. He eyed the clouds moving across the moon, listened for changing inflections in the wind.
Sometimes, then, he would hear that sudden, deathly quiet – and with it came that cold, tingling feeling on the back of his creased, sun-browned neck. So he’d hurry to roust out the family and herd them toward the storm cellar in the back yard, where they’d crouch on the raw dirt floor and listen to the creaks and thunder and moans straining against the earth above them. And pray.
Mother got so she could read the signs, too. One evening, when I was a young boy, she was up late, finishing a phone call with a friend. My father was out of town, so my little sister and I were sprawled in the big bed with her. Even before she hung up the phone, her meteorological sixth sense had been nagging at her. Our Memphis home drew its own share of tornadoes, and the trees had been pitching and the winds howling all along our street for a while now.
Then the pitching and the howling abruptly stopped. Everything went deathly quiet.
Mother grabbed up my sister and hollered for me to follow her. But I was mostly asleep. I heard her, out on the far edges of the land of Nod, but the bed was warm and the pillow soft and the dream especially pleasant.
Somewhere far, far away, I heard her distant voice again.
Then the window on my side of the bed exploded.
I jumped, turned, threw back the sheets, vaulted from the bed, and sped down the hall, in an extraordinarily fluid motion that was easily the single most graceful athletic performance of my life. I found them in the bathroom, where Mother was settling my sister onto the floor of the tub.
“Stay here,” she ordered, and slipped back into the hallway, leaving me alone with my first command.
Outside, something like the Battle of Gettysburg seemed to be going on around and above our house: thunder, wind, distant booms, tree branches cracking, tree trunks bending, fences and roofs taking leave of their houses. I faced a sudden moral crisis: my mother’s orders were to stay with my sister, but now Mom herself might be in danger out there – what if she needed me and I couldn’t hear her above the din?
I looked, wide-eyed, at my sister, who was looking, wide-eyed, at me.
“Stay here,” I ordered, and plunged out into the hall. There, doubts engulfed me. Was I deserting my post? I glanced back into the bathroom. My sister had crawled out of the tub, placed her doll carefully inside, and was now ordering the doll to stay put. (Chain of command.)
I waited for her to catch up to me, and we crept down the trembling hall, feeling the whole house moving, listening to the ominous cacophony all around us. Our mother stood at the front screen door, watching a fair amount of our neighborhood blow by. I peered around her pajamaed leg; my sister peered around me, and we all watched the pitched battle between light and dark, the rampaging winds and the stubborn trees and cars and houses.
Sometimes, listening to the news these last few weeks, I feel like I’m back at that screen door again, taking in the sound and the fury of a coming apocalypse. Maybe the Apocalypse.
The patriot in me seethes and grieves over the blind and ignorant destructions of our history, as if we could endlessly yank thread after thread from the American tapestry and expect to have anything – much less anything beautiful – left. But then, as many of the destroyers now freely concede, that’s pretty much the point. They don’t want anything left but dust on which to rebuild a new nation, conceived not in sweeter brotherhood but in their own raging, violent image.
The Christian in me is watching the growing destruction of churches and statues of Jesus and His saints, the aggressive moves of state and local governments to silence churches and disband their meetings. “It’s only buildings,” some say. “It’s only for a few months. None of it really means anything.”
A hint: people don’t destroy the symbols of Christianity because they secretly admire the meaning of Christianity … the people who are Christians … the God Christians love. If they’ve come for the buildings, they’ll be coming soon for us.
Some people see that, and are trying to wake up the rest of us. But our beds are warm, our pillows are soft, and our dreams have been especially pleasant.
We’re enjoying Nod, not listening for God.
You can always tell when the worst of the storm is about to hit, because amid all the raging elements, the air around you suddenly falls so deathly, deathly quiet. That’s the warning sign – the clue that all hell is about to break loose.
That awful quiet … like what you hear coming from so many of our churches, these last few months.
An old adage warns to, “Beware the anger of a patient man.” The biblical prophet Nahum (Nahum? Nahum.) must have been familiar with that idea, for he says the same is true of God.
“The Lord is slow to anger and great in power,” he writes, “and will not at all acquit the wicked. The Lord has His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet.”
There’s great comfort in that, as I stand at America’s screen door, the house trembling about me, watching the growing clouds, feeling the wind rising.
I just wish it wasn’t so quiet.
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