Strange Phenomena

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. - Matthew 24:6-8

I've started wondering if the end is near. A week ago, Ryan and I are were driving from St. Louis to Mt. Vernon in seperate cars, behind one another. There was a lightening storm in the distance that we were driving towards. All of a sudden we saw a dot of brilliant light soar through the air, pass behind a cloud, then reapper on the other side. Several thoughts went through my head... "Too small to be a plane that's crashing." "If it were a meteor, it wouldn't have passed behind clouds, it would have been way up in the atmosphere. If it was a meteor that big, we would have seen a crash." "If I believed in aliens, I would think I just saw one!" I tried to call Ryan, and it went straight to voice mail, which seemed even freakier. (Was this an alien space ship jamming our cellular signals? :) ) I wasn't even sure if Ryan had seen it, but when we got home, the first thing he said was, "Did you see that?!" The next day our next door neighbor, the science teacher, told us we had probably seen a rare phenomenon called ball lightning, where lightning takes the shape of a sphere, rather than a straight line. It's hard to prove scientifically simply because it's so rare and hard to track, but there are plenty of antecdotal stories out there to confirm it.

That was last week. Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and our bed was shaking. Honestly, the first thought that crossed my mind was that it felt like when our washing machine is unbalanced, and it shakes the floor of the kitchen. Waking up from a dead sleep, I wasn't exactly thinking properly, so I didn't seriously consider an earthquake, although it crossed my mind. I asked Ryan, "Are you shaking the bed?" He said, "No." I didn't believe him. "No really, hon', are you shaking the bed?" "No! I'm not! It's an earthquake." "Really?"... pause... "Wait... for real? That was an earthquake?" I went back to sleep, still suspicious my husband was playing a prank on me. This morning I woke up and, sure enough, the cover story on CNN.com was about how a 5.2 earthquake struck about 30 miles from here.

Is the end of the world near?