It’s unlikely that any of us around here will ever forget the week of Valentine’s Day 2014.
It’s old news by now, but I want to comment on the momentous events of that week anyway.
With a nod to songwriter Carole King, we felt “the earth move under our feet and the sky tumblin’ down.” A snowstorm followed by two earthquakes—“flakes and quakes” as some tagged it. Not exactly what we’re used to in these parts.
In the days that followed the Valentine’s evening earthquake, it seems everyone was talking about where they were and what they thought when it happened. And we all had our stories to tell, didn’t we?
“I thought a plane had crashed … I thought a helicopter was flying too low … I thought a car had driven into our house … I thought a neighbor’s house had exploded.”
Unless you’d gone to bed early and slept like a dead person, it was pretty hard to miss that first quake.
I was standing in the kitchen and my husband was in the living room doing some back exercises. (No, he was NOT wearing yoga pants.)
Our house sits way off the road and there aren’t any railroad tracks nearby, so when it suddenly sounded like an 18-wheeler or a freight train was about to plow through the door, I was definitely flummoxed. I ran into the living room and bellowed, “What the heck is going on?!!”
Joe and I bounded out to our deck—yes, we can still bound when sufficiently motivated—to see if an alien spacecraft had perhaps landed in our pasture. Seeing no weird lights, strange beings or death rays, I did what many others also did—I checked Facebook to see if anyone else had felt a whole lot of shakin’ going on.
And there it was—a friend in Columbia posted, “Earthquake!”
Within seconds, other comments about the quake appeared. I felt slightly less disoriented (although I must say that reading Facebook posts doesn’t always have that kind of settling effect on me).
Since the earthquake, some spiritual applications and lessons have occurred to me.
The most obvious is the teaching of Jesus, recorded in Matthew 24, where He says that numerous earthquakes will be among the “birth pangs” that will immediately precede His return to this earth. If that sounds a bit nuts to you, take it up with Jesus. He said it, not me. Yes, there have always been earthquakes, but many Bible scholars agree that prophesied events seem to be escalating and converging now as never before.
Observation number two: When my son and his wife decided to move to California, my first reaction was, “Oh, no! There are way too many earthquakes out there!”
How ironic. My son reports they haven’t felt even a single tremor.
I’m reminded there’s no safer place to be than in the palm of God’s hand and the middle of His plan, wherever that leads us.
And finally, my last observation is this: In Hebrews 12, the Bible speaks of “the removing of those things which can be shaken, as of created things, so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”
So, what can’t be shaken? According to this passage, God’s kingdom. It may be harder to see with our natural eyes than the kingdoms of this world, but God’s kingdom is the only one that will survive all the “shaking” that’s coming. If we want to survive it, too, we must place our faith in and build our lives upon Jesus Christ, the one unshakable Rock in this shaky world.
“He only is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I shall not be greatly shaken.” – Psalm 62:2