Atmospheres

To God:

Just when I think You're finished talking to me through symbolic and repetitive activity, You give me pause over something new...the idea of the atmosphere. Look up, You seem to say.

Atmosphere. The word pops up again and again. A photo blog I follow has gone for multiple days under the title "visible atmosphere." I wonder how many days the blogger will feel inclined to use this theme? Then my middle son brings me a new (to him anyway) song to hear by a favorite Christian band who sing about God The lyrics of the chorus: "Just turn around and I'll be there, moving into your atmosphere." Suddenly, I am encountering the word atmosphere often enough to prompt me to ask You if this means anything.

Then You bring to my mind my husband's dream of some time ago...a few months maybe. He is working in a community when suddenly bad weather strikes...a sudden raging set of tornadoes akin to the ones created through computer graphics in the movie The Day after Tomorow. In his dream, as these tornadoes are throwing everyone into a scrambling panic, he finds a small pond and dives in, sinking to the bottom. Breathing is not an issue in the dream, rather he lies there watching the storms carrying their unwilling passengers and objects over the top of the water. But he is perfectly safe at the bottom of this little pool of water.

And finally, this morning as I opened my Bible for my morning Bible reading, I went to the two prophetic books I've been reading lately and find each of these ideas successively in the places I had marked to read next:

"The burden against the Wilderness of the Sea.
As whirlwinds from the South pass through,
So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land.
A distressing vision is declared to me;
The treacherous dealer deals treacherously,
And the plunderer plunders...
...For thus has the Lord said to me:
'Go set a watchman,
Let him declare what he sees.'
Isaiah 21

And then this one was my second reading:

"Behold the whirlwind of the Lord
Goes forth with fury,
A continuing whirlwind;
It falls violently on the head of the wicked.
The fierce anger of the Lord will not return until He has done it.
And until He has performed the intents of His heart.
In the latter days you will consider it."
Jeremiah 30

Given the fact that I wasn't looking for references on weather conditions, and yet weather imagery is everywhere, I feel the need to look up, to ask for protection...Especially for Scott. From the imagery of his own dream, I pray that he finds the pond of safety You've created for him. Strange, strange, strange.

Oh, and while we're at it, God, can You explain the strange cheese imagery, too? Between my dream of finding a steaming casserole dish of macaroni and cheese strangely placed in a kitchen cabinet and Scott's of sitting eating cheese fondue in the middle of a field, both dreams within the last few days...what's the deal with trying to show us something about dairy products in places unfamiliar? Cheese. Begins as milk before it curdles and ages. Milk. The first food of a man's life...are You going to show me a Biblical perspective on this one, too? So strange the way You talk to us...giving us things that are odd enough that there seems no way to attribute them to our own psychic undercurrent. As always, I come away from Your strange messages knowing little else to say other than, "Let it be according to Your word, O God."