About this time last week, we were warned the gates of hell were about to open. Escape while there’s time, they said, run for the hills. It’s coming, the hurricane. Evacuate, don’t look back. Save life and limb; don’t be like Lot’s wife who looked back. You know what happens when you fall for that backward glance.
Dorian the son of perdition, is its name. Formerly named Diablo, it was changed at the last minute so as not to suggest anything demonically sinister. Weather channel groupies were freaked out already and didn’t need any extra adrenaline.
No time to waste, the tv blasted. Dorian is on the way up the Atlantic coastline, promising to bring its Category 5 destruction with it. Of course, Jim and the weather team had prepped us for the horror to come about ten days earlier. As it approached the mainline, the dire warnings proved prescient. It left a wrath of destruction in Freeport, Abaco and Marsh Harbor.
The mass exodus and diaspora began, clogging roads and creating frenetic pandemonium. Lacking rain or wind sufficient to frame cinematic scenes, tv reporters were hard-pressed for excitement and resorted to interviews with harried gas shoppers and Walmart water purchasers. Exciting photos of wave foam blowing across vacant sands set something less of a tragic scene. After the Bahamas, you might say Dorian lacked drama.
Natural disasters are prime opportunities for advertisers on weather channels. They have even taken to choreographing the various scenes with music appropriate to situation. Drumbeats added to the urgency while trumpets and violins bring a heightened crescendo to the impending end times. Hand it to the advertising gurus, they know how to squeeze the utmost farthing from acts of God.
Dorian is the third hurricane in four years to head up the coast. Something’s clearly going on. It reminds me of the ancient prophesy by the prophet Haggai and later retold in the book of Hebrews:
“Yet once more I shake not only the earth but the heavens as well; and this saying, ‘Yet once more,’ signifies the removing of the things that are shaken, as things that are made, so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.” Now meditate on this for a while.
Of course, no hurricane is a meditative matter. And anyone foolish enough to ‘ride it out’ has no brain from which to meditate. But being human, we Georgians waited anxiously to see the next card, glued to our tv’s for every hour-by-hour update. Leave or stay, we only decide at the last minute. We stayed, camping out at my brother’s home.
As it happened, Dorian sashayed about 100 miles out following the Gulf Stream. It swept the beaches clean and blew us a kiss as it passed by, sort of a reminder of hey, you owe me one.
Haggai was not alone in prophesy it seems. POTUS even found a way to light up the twitter lines. He prophesied that Alabama was the real destination of Dorian. But try as he might, he was unable to force a change of direction of the winds.
Nevertheless, the ruse apparently worked. While his sanity was again in question, his aids secretly brokered a trade deal with China. Today we own Hong Kong, and California has been ceded to China.
When we returned to our home the next day, we found nothing, just twigs and leaves scattered around. Not a limb was broken, not a tree had fallen. The Haggai text indeed proved a point. I sat on the porch and thought about it. We were blessed this time. Escaped what others did not.
This morning the butterflies float carelessly in slow motion over the flower garden. Two hummingbirds hover in midair, inspecting the late summer flowers and the cardinals fight over the feeder portals. All is peaceful…for now.
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‘Twigs and leaves’ give affirmation to Haggai’s prophesy. The winds blow, the rains fall and the weak are shaken. But the strong remain. As in nature, so in life.
Dorian is past, but its metaphor lingers. Twigs and leaves…It’s something to consider after a hurricane.
Bud Hearn
September 11, 2019