As I was walking out of King’s College at the Empire State Building the other day, Professor Bill Edgar’s wife said to me, “You should blog about the weather.”

“The weather,” that was an interesting way to put it. I knew she had in mind the earthquakes that had just ripped China, the cyclone that socked Myanmar, and the tornados that tore up western United States. Her choice of language brought me back to “The Wizard of Oz,” when four pilgrims to the Emerald City nearly succumbed to the “weather” of the poppies’ narcotic fumes, and Glinda sent a summer snow to reverse the curse. “Unusual weather we’re having, ain’t it,” said the Lion, in splendid understatement, as the wayfarers revived.

If you have an imagination, you can add to that inclement strangeness the recent economic weather, with yet more foreclosures and other cosmic ripples in the forecast. Stretch the concept a bit more by including rumors of worldwide “famines,” “nations rising up against nations,” throw in the 60th birthday of Israel, and you have the “unusual weather” Jesus described in Matthew 24, precursor of the storm to end all storms.

Christians are often ridiculed, even by other Christians, for seeing portents of the eschatological “birth pains.” But I’m not the one who said, “From the fig tree learn its lesson…when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates” (Matthew 24:33). Jesus himself commands his people to monitor the situation: “Keep watch” (v.42), “be ready” (v.44).