THE HABOOB FROM HELL

Throughout the years of living and traveling throughout the country I have experienced some very interesting weather. A week or so ago though we had a storm here in Phoenix that some people have called a hundred year storm, meaning you only get one like that every hundred years or so. The city of Phoenix basically lies in a bowl in the middle of the desert. Most of the time that just means we get some really hot days like 115 to 118 in the summer. Phoenix is basically known as a hot and dry place which is it is most of the time. I say most of the time because we have a thing here called the monsoon season. Now when I think of monsoons I think of Southeast Asia and places like that, but certainly not the hot dry desert of Arizona. So I was surprised when I moved here and found out about it. Now admittedly our monsoon season is nothing like those in other wet places in the world where it rains for days and weeks on end. Our monsoons come out of nowhere packed with rain that falls for 5 minutes or so and then is followed by a huge wind bringing dust and dirt. Usually the whole event takes 15 minutes and then you go outside and start to clean up the mess it left. These dust storms are called haboobs. The one we had a week or so ago though was the Haboobs of all haboobs. When it arrived it was daylight and the sun was brightly shining. I live in the very southeast corner of Phoenix bordering the city of Chandler so my house was one of the first ones hit. My neighbor took pictures of it coming and they are amazing. At 7:23 you see it looming in the background of a beautiful sunny day with everything at peace. One minute later it is looming over my house like an angry monster looking to devour everything. One minute after that the sunny day has become pitch black the trees bowing in the wind and things flying through the air, absolutely terrifying. The storm went on for over an hour without letting up. The aftermath thankfully to my house was just a lot of dirt and dust everywhere. In other places there were trees down, power lines taken out and people without electricity. Overall for such a monstrous storm it did very little damage. The images of the storm though are other worldly. I spent that storm in my office working and watched it at times through the front windows of the church.
Yesterday we had another haboob, this one not near as bad. I was home and saw it coming and took several pictures which I posted on Facebook. Although it was a minor storm compared to the monster it was ominous watching it come. Here is my best description of it. The sun is shining and then you start to see a brown cloud in the distance. You walk outside and realize it’s not a cloud but a haboob. As you are watching you realize that it is taking in everything. You look to the right and to the left and it takes up your whole view. Suddenly the wind picks up, and your phone rings and it's someone you know telling you to be prepared that a haboob is on the way. You say, “Yeah I know, I’m watching it.” By this time the cloud seems to be right in front of you and the palm trees are bending and the dust is starting to fly, so you step back into your house and watch it through the glass. In ten minutes, it’s gone. It’s an amazing thing to watch, exciting and yet terrifying at the same time. Watching the one yesterday got me to thinking though. Is this how the end of the world is going to be like? Many people in the last few weeks have told me they have also thought about that. It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer of course. I do know from what Scripture says that one day the end is going to come.
As a Lutheran I don’t subscribe to a rapture or to anything everyone read in the Left Behind series of books that came out many years ago. Although I will have to say unlike so many of my fundamentalist friends who do hold to those teachings I actually read all of the books of the Left Behind series. I found them poorly written and a horrible twisting of Scripture, but I gutted it out and read the whole series just so I could tell my fundamentalist friends that I had read the whole thing when they hadn’t, so there! Actually I love my fundy friends and look forward to spending eternity with them in heaven, where I will jokingly keep pointing out how wrong they were. As a Lutheran I believe that Scripture teaches that Jesus will come back someday, I don’t know when and neither does anyone else, and the end of the world will happen. Scripture tells us it will come when we least expect it and it will be sudden. Jesus even told the people to look up when the end came because their redemption was drawing near. I thought about that as I looked up at the haboob the other day. Is this how the end is going to come, with Jesus in the front of a storm gobbling up everything? That would certainly be a scary sight. And yet from what I read in the Bible I am not afraid of the end of the world. No believer in Christ should ever be afraid of the end of the world; it just means we are going home to be with God. So many church leaders though try to scare people with this, they write books, do movies that lead people to fear the end. As a believer in Christ I look forward to the end, I know where I am going because of Christ’s death and resurrection. I once said in a sermon that to try to scare a Christian with the end of the world is like trying to scare an overworked guy with the fact that vacation might be coming next week.
I don’t like the Haboobs we experience here because they are a pain to clean up after, so the fewer of them the better. At the same time I look forward with great anticipation to the final great Haboob that Jesus will bring. In the words of John from the book of Revelation, “Amen, come Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”