Thunderstorms and the Fear of God

At this also my heart trembles,
    and leaps out of its place.
² Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice
    and the rumbling that comes from his mouth.
³ Under the whole heaven he lets it loose,
    and his lightning to the corners of the earth.
⁴ After it his voice roars;
    he thunders with his majestic voice
    and he does not restrain the lightnings  when his voice is heard.
⁵ God thunders wondrously with his voice;
    he does great things that we cannot comprehend.

Job 37

Do you enjoy a good thunderstorm? You may feel that no T-storm is a good T-storm and there are lots of people and pets who would agree with you. They can be dangerous and I was at the Ontario  Bark Lake Leadership Camp as a teen when a lightning strike hit close to a group doing a bog walk and one of the young people was paralyzed for several hours. Humans and livestock perish every year because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. 
I've heard several lightning items on the news in recent days and listeners to the CBC were invited to communicate their close-call stories this morning. We've had a few of our own through the years. Ruth and I paddled the Sand River years ago and were forced to camp on a sandbar in a canyon in the midst of torrential rain. We watched the river rising and the sound of thunder was amplified in the narrow defile. It was exhilarating and terrifying. We camped in the wilds of Killarney Park with our three children when a thunderstorm swept through our area. We were on Grace Lake, a hanging lake with a 1400 metre portage in, so we had no choice but to wait it out.





The bible has lots of passages about thunder and lightning which are seen as a manifestation of God's power and might. A noisy thunderstorm can certainly put the fear of God in a person, particularly when there is little between you and a gajillion volts of raw energy.

I wonder if it's good to have our cages rattled from time to time? We humans tend to delude ourselves into thinking we are in charge and can control the elements. It just ain't so, and some existential terror is a good reminder of our smallness when we're getting too big for our britches. When Job is pondering his agony God is less than sympathetic and the poor guy realizes how finite he is, as we see above. The prophet Ezekiel has his own experience of a fierce storm before God speaks to him "the sound of sheer silence."

One more lightning story. One year we visited the remarkable Mesa Verde in Colorado, the site of the cliff dwellings for the Ancestral Pueblo people who mysteriously left around 1300 AD. It was an amazing opportunity to clamber about in those cave-like dwellings, but we also experienced a natural light show that evening from our lodge balcony. We were mesmerized by hundreds of "dry lightning" strikes to the west of us in Utah and Arizona, all devoid of sound or rain.

So, may you all experience some holy terror this summer, and God be with you!

Are you a thunderstorm fan?  Do they put the fear of the Creator in you?