Blessings!

My wife, who has banked sufficient experience to know, claims her husband is downright intolerant about standing in lines. She's right. If we're bound to a particular restaurant, and the space outside is already SRO with eager diners, I'll suggest Culvers. I hate waiting. 

Pictures out of Florida right now trigger horrors. The lines yesterday around Floridian Costcos were endless, freeways north bumper-to-bumper. Everything is choked. Gas is gold.

It would be comforting to believe that time is standing still, but it isn't. Irma is coming soon. "The winds and waves obey Him," we used to sing in Christian school. Sweet testimony, but Irma's winds and waves? Really? That's a whole different kind of faith.

The videos picture sheer madness, as a half million Floridians--east coast and west--need to form a single lane to get up and out of the peninsula. Irma is wider than the 160 miles from one side to the other. Millions have become kindergartners--"Okay, kids, now--get in line." Only they're not kids--they're frantic adults, and they have to be frightened because what Irma has already left in its wake is almost total devastation, one island after another. 

Texas?--who remembers just last week? An entire country's devoted attention is on Florida right now because weathermen and women, real meteorologists, scientists, are throwing up their hands--"No one's ever seen anything like it." In Florida, it looks for all the world as if this is the big one, just as it did in Texas last week.

President Trump shocked pols everywhere by sidling up to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, a totally unexpected shift conservatives considered akin to signing a pact with Mr. and Mrs. Satan. It's not easy for me to be sympathetic with this President, but you can't help but guess that Trump wasn't thinking about politics but catastrophes. It's entirely possible that Miami will be inundated, just as Houston was, that the price tag for rebuilding will be beyond anyone's imagination. Ain't no time for games. Things have to be done. 

In the great dust storms of the Dirty Thirties, good Christian people began to think the black sky signaled "end times," Judgment Day had come. It wouldn't be long and the trumpets would sound. 

Harvey and Irma--sounds like a cartoon--shake that fear free again. Two huge chunks of the American populace find themselves in madness going off the charts. Some will certainly believe the end is near.

It's all horrifying. This morning I'm thankful to be here and safe and out of those long, long lines; but I'm also thankful for the battalions of heroes who have and will selflessly help those less able, those who risk their lives for others, those who already have--and died. 

Those two storms are anything but cartoons. They have and will alter the lands they will rule for a time. 

In Texas, I'm guessing, the sun is shining again, as it will soon in Florida. That it's not end times doesn't mean there's an end to the need for prayer.