tornado

As I stand on the threshold of another Friday, I'm wondering where this week went!

But I think I know. Last week's storms have left a trail of devastation in their wake: and the challenge of trying to create a measure of order out of all the chaos and consternation thereby caused has been hugely time-consuming.

Meetings, e-mails, conversations by the score: hours and hours (quite literally) of working things through with a whole range of folk, confused, distressed, perplexed as to what's going on. And a great amount of prayerful reflection and painful, heart-searching thought.

In a former life, when I worked on farms in the summers, I once was asked to burn a field of straw. The day was calm and windless, but my tiny match, when its flame lit the straw, triggered a mini-tornado.

Don't ask me how exactly. I don't really know the physics or the chemistry of what was going on. All I know was that in seconds flat a raging fire had begun and a spiralling tunnel of flame was racing down the field at the rate of knots, creating a gale in its wake.

Scary. And the damage it caused was immense.

Strange how the tiny spark of a single 'match' (or 'mis-match': I'm speaking now in relational terms, and how these things are viewed by the Word of God) can fuel such winds of false and unscriptural teaching which then spiral into massive, big 'tornadoes', and wreak such rapid havoc on an unsuspecting land.