T-Storms and Quakes and The Beast, Oh My

The gods must be angry.

On Sunday they hurled lightning bolts at us. On Tuesday they shook the ground beneath our feet.

I was doing what I do best on Sunday afternoon: sitting on my back porch. I’d finished lolling with the Sunday Times and had shifted to putting the finishing touches on my syllabi for the fall semester.

The sky darkened quickly. The flashes came closer. Two of the thunderclaps were so loud I coptered out of my chair, even though I knew they were coming. Then the rain came so hard, the porch roof was no protection and I retreated indoors.

And then it lasted so long at that intensity that I went into flood prevention mode. At my house that means charging down the basement steps to man the Shop-Vac.

As I feared, water was sluicing down the outside stairwell at a rate faster than the little drain on the landing could swallow it. Two inches higher and it would lap under the basement door. I went to work: vacuum, pour down the laundry room sink, repeat.

For a while, I fought the floodtide to a draw: My efforts had caused the water level to stop rising, but not to fall. By about the 30th gallon, the storm subsided. The water level dropped. I could hear the drain again. Flood averted! Time to survey the damage elsewhere.

Nothing major until I got to Sparks Street in Holmes-Foster. There, a huge tree had fallen from the front yard across the side yard and into the back yard, narrowly missing the house.

In a surprisingly dense mini-forest between that house and the one on the next block, smoke rose from one of the trees. A West Penn Power employee explained that the downed tree had pushed a power line into the smoking tree. He seemed to be on the case.

Around the corner on Hamilton, the neighbors were less lucky. A tree had clipped the corner of the garage of one house and landed squarely on the roof of another: a twofer. The roof was already tarped over and the homeowners, who had apparently moved from the shock-and-chagrin to the coulda-been-a-lot-worse stage, were talking about ordering a pizza.

***

I was heading into the last 15 minutes of my first journalism ethics class of the new semester when a herd of hippos galloped across the roof. At least, that was the odd thought that popped into my head as the room and its occupants trembled.

I had experienced my share of earthquakes during the 20 years I lived in California, but this was Central Pennsylvania. I assumed the shaking somehow related to construction going on outside the building. It was only when I overheard three different people say the word ‘earthquake’ on my walk back to my office that I knew what my herd of hippos had really been.

E-mail confirmation from Penn State public information and a photo from a friend in New York of people evacuating a building on Park Avenue quickly followed.

Among Californians, a 5.8 quake isn’t even worth talking about. The Times reported that they jeered at our overreaction. But hey, we’re a little jumpy here in the Northeast, with the 9/11 anniversary looming.

***

To find out what to make of these violent natural occurrences we turn now to the Rapture Index. Raptureready.com arrives at its index by factoring together ‘a number of related end time components into a cohesive indicator’ of how close we are to ‘the occurrence of pre-tribulation rapture.’

End-time components range from various signs of economic, geopolitical and moral disintegration to those associated with Mark of the Beast. Also factored in: Wild Weather and Earthquakes.

The folks at Raptureready assign numerical values to each of the factors and add them all up. As the totals increase we go from slow (100 and below) to moderate (100 to 130) to heavy (130 to 160) prophetic activity. Anything above 160, and it’s time to ‘fasten your seat belts.’

Aug. 22, the day before the quake, registered a 183, which is only one notch below the record high achieved earlier this month on Aug. 8. And what, you may ask, made Aug, 8 such a grim day? Reply hazy. Try again.

Another site, ChristianEgalitarian.com, which claims to be more objective than Raptureready, notes that all of the pre-conditions for the rapture have already taken place except for one: ‘The one where He told us that the indicators (earthquakes, etc.) would undergo a period of increasing intensification and frequency akin to a woman’s undergoing labor pains that come closer and closer together.’

Note that there were also quakes in Colorado and California within a day of our little seismic event in Virginia. And that as I write this, a hurricane is barreling toward the coast. Fasten those seat belts.