Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Around 5:00 pm, PT, there was a jolt and a little shaking. Another and slightly larger jolt followed that with a considerably longer shake that rattled everything in the house. In the next 10 minutes there were three aftershocks in a row. Maybe it was three more earthquakes, and the aftershocks came later. I’m no seismologist. I am, however, a native Californian and I have felt earthquakes before.

You get complacent because you feel itty-bity shakes often, that register as earthquakes in your brain, but they do not effect you otherwise. Last night was not like that. Just when you relaxed another shaking would begin. My eleven year old granddaughter (also a native Californian) never experienced such a disturbance in the force. Grandma never had either – not since the Bay Bridge collapse in 1989.

Seeing the map this morning made me think of Jesus’s apostles in Matthew 24: 3-14.

In answer, Jesus said to them ”… You are going to hear of wars and reports of wars.  See that you are not alarmed for these things must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another.  All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress. Then people will hand you over to tribulation and will kill you. You will be hated by all the nations on account of my name… And because of the increasing of the lawlessness, the love of the greater number will grow cold.  But the one who has endured to the end will be saved.  And this good news of the kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for a witness to all the nations, and then, the end will come.”

Okay then. I think we know we are feeling ‘pangs of distress’. My question is – Just how close are we to preaching the good news to all the inhabited earth?

TTFN