I left for my almost two-week vacation on a Wednesday, the day after the recent hurricane blew through the Northern Neck. In the higher altitude of the North Carolina Blue Ridge mountains around Boone the weather appeared peaceful. However, Sunday morning about 8 a.m. I was standing in Torre and David's kitchen frying an egg for breakfast when there was a subtle but definite rumble and the ground shook beneath my feet. Come to

out it was a 5.1 scale earthquake, a “moderate” earthquake on scale, but the largest earthquake in western North Carolina in over one hundred years. Earthquakes occur when fault lines shift. Boone, where I was visiting family was only about thirty miles from the epicenter of the earthquake which also was experienced along the Virginia border north of the epicenter. By the end of that week, the rains would start, the kind of rain that built into what might best be called a deluge off and on during my last few days there. 

Speaking of Virginia - from Richmond and along coastal Virginia reports from family and friends confirmed deluge conditions here too, sounding even more severe than what was happening in the Boone Blue Ridge. As I drove home Monday afternoon the weather was clear, though I noted large clouds building along the horizon. That night I reviewed the Wakefield weekly weather briefing I scan each Monday to check out what might be predicted for the week ahead. Bullet points for our Northern Neck area included: “isolated strong and severe thunderstorms” and “localized flash flooding may occur due to saturated soils from recent heavy rains.” Sure enough, Monday night brought another deluge though Tuesday morning (yesterday) dawned bright and clear yet leaving me with a sense that there is more weather to come.

The weather in our lives, of course, is not just the physical kind, though it seems that we have had an unusual batch of severe weather happening this summer, from the intense record breaking heat indexes of July to the storms of August. Our psychological and emotional weather is also occasioned by what is going on in in the world around us and we have had a record breaking half year of that, with COVID-19, societal and systemic tensions as underground fault lines shift and now breaking in on us the clouds forming on our political horizon. Our new Assistant Bishop, The Rt. Rev. Porter Taylor (a former Bishop in Western North Carolina) offers a Reflection for this week on this topic, timely as political conventions start this week and we cross that horizon perhaps with some fear and trembling. We have been, to use Wakefield weather briefing language, saturated with the weather in our lives this past several months and underground fault lines are shifting and rumbling. I am reminded of the first lines of Psalm 46:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea; though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble at its tumult. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.” (Ps.46:1-4)

I suggest that Bishop Taylor is trying to help us consider what does in times like these anchor us, ground our being, so we can move with calm through whatever stormy weather may be ahead.

           By God’s amazing grace we will move through this time . . .

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