Wacky weather, this

It should come as no surprise whatsoever that I tell you I'm writing this as lights flicker and thunder booms and rain falls and one of the dachshunds is shakily walking around the parsonage looking for massive amounts of drugs to take he's so scared.

After all, it's a day that ends in Y in Eunice.

It's summer, but this is no summer weather pattern, or at least as I remember it from the far, far past.

Warmer oceans may be causing jellyfish swarms from Japan to Florida, ruining vacations, stinging swimmers, foiling fishermen. Millions of the giant ones. Twenty-thousand leagues under the sea sized ones. Okay, I made that part up, but they’re biguns.

It snowed in the U.S. in May. May. Did I mention that it snowed in May? Wacky weather, this.

Heavy sandstorms are wracking Baghdad. Oh, that happens all the time, never mind..

And a French sociologist declared the Smurfs to be racist, which has nothing to do with weather but it simply another sign that the end of the world as we know it is upon us.

Is it the end, or just a weird beginning to a summer that already has two tropical storms named before we get to July 4? Well, both.

Clearly things were, uh, unusual this spring, continuing a pattern of the past few years. Wacky weather, this.

In sunny California, there was a frost in April. Temperatures in the Bay Area were 15-20 degrees below normal in May. The winter across the country was much colder than normal, with record snow falls that produced record melted waters.

Last year at this time there was a drought going on in the South, even as flood waters were going down? Meanwhile, April temperatures for central England were the warmest in the entire 353 year record that stretches back to 1659. Wacky weather, this.

This year, there was less than 20% of normal rainfall over large parts of England during both March and April.

So Tuesday in England, leading scientists and meteorologists met to discuss the UK's unusual weather patterns in recent years. Their conclusion? Wacky weather, this.

This comes after the Met Office said below-average temperatures through March, April and May made it the fifth coldest spring in national records dating back to 1910 and the coldest spring since 1962.

In Alaska Wednesday (Alaska?), the place was sweltering in temps that were above 80 degrees in a place where few have air conditioning. While that sounds like relief to our ears, temperatures are normally in the 60s in June. In Anchorage Tuesday, 81 degrees broke the record of 80 set in 1926.

It's wacky out there, friends, is my point. Someone once spoke about how much we talk about the weather but no one does anything about it, and I guess that's about right -- especially seeing how we can't do anything about it really but we’re talking about it all the time.

But in pondering all this on a dark, wet morning, I went back to the source.

In the book of Job, God says (in the Message), "Have you ever traveled to where snow is made, seen the vault where hail is stockpiled, The arsenals of hail and snow that I keep in readiness for times of trouble and battle and war? Can you find your way to where lightning is launched, or to the place from which the wind blows? Who do you suppose carves canyons for the downpours of rain, and charts the route of thunderstorms That bring water to unvisited fields, deserts no one ever lays eyes on, Drenching the useless wastelands so they’re carpeted with wildflowers and grass? And who do you think is the father of rain and dew, the mother of ice and frost? You don’t for a minute imagine these marvels of weather just happen, do you?"

Well, no. Guess not.

I'm not absolutely certain how that applies to the puddles that are amassing below my office window, but I do believe this: Even if we've wrecked the climate (a debate in which we've spent way too much time and money when one reads the column above), God still is in control. God controls it all. Do I know or understand all his ways? Nope. Do I know why he allowed folks to go swimming in pristine lakes normally freezing cold? Nope.

Do I know He's sovereign? You betcha. Call me wacky, but I do.