Weather

I have been wrestling with thoughts on the earthquake and now the hurricane. I've prayed and know I'm called to write stories. Jesus is the Story-teller and we are all involved in His story, the Greatest Story Ever Told. I'm not a theologian, although I've been studying the Good Book for almost 50 years, beginning with my best teacher, my dad.
It was after we moved to 432 Main Street, I was on the floor of the blue-green carpet by the stone fireplace on a Sunday. My father asked me, "What did you learn about in Sunday School?" That day, it was the woman at the well(John 4). Dad proceeded to get the Bible story book out and tell more about this woman. I have since loved this episode. Any song about the well, the Living Water, holding a special place in my heart.
Dad always helped me learn. He loved God and His Word, continually studying. I had a sermon for youth Sunday, he critiqued it after I wrote it. I had a question, he answered it. My freshman year of nursing, my roommate challenged me about the Virgin birth. Just a year earlier, the first test tube baby had been born. Dad compared those two, just to say, sex is not necessary for procreation. God just did it first and best.
As I think more about these current events, I can't say,"Yes, definitely, this is God's judgment." That is tricky philosophy for sure. But it is interesting that for years, they have been called "Acts of God" by insurance companies. And can we ignore weather in literature? Just this past week, I read the account in Bram Stoker's Dracula of the captain's log of his ship's passage to England with the count on the vessel. The next morning, in my path through Acts that I have been following this summer, Paul's dangerous sea journey to Rome was the story. Because of the darkness of the night before reading, I could truly imagine the events on Paul and Luke's boat- 14 days at sea, being tossed about and no food.
So, weather plays such an important role in literature- the wind changes and Mary Poppins appears or goes away, a cyclone whisks Dorothy to the land of Oz, Snoopy, in Peanuts, always starts his story,"a dark stormy night" Frank Peretti uses the gathering storms as the result of the angels and demons fighting. We are just pawns in the weather, aren't we? Watch the wind rip apart a house. Observe the footage of an earthquake in a store.
How about titles,The Winter of Our Discontent,The Hurricane by Rose Wilder Lane,Summer of My German Soldier are a few I remember right now. The whole book mentions a weather or season phenomenon. I can now think of so many summer stories that with the coming of fall, life has changed. I think of the beginning of World War II and events in my own memory that I will share at another time.
So I can't say that these current events are God's judgment on America, but they have been dramatic. I've also been doing a Bible study on Amos and in chapter 7, God withheld judgment from ancient Israel, even though she didn't repent. In my mind's eye, I saw God's Hand holding back disasters, but my question is, "Is His hand lifting?"