I wrote this Tuesday and forgot to publish
They used to do this in Leadville Co. Still do I guess. I was made to believe that this picture was taken not too long ago. Get a horse and a rider and a long rope and a someone with skies. Then you make jumps like we all did when we were kids and see how far we could fly. The horse goes full speed and the skier maneuvers a course of jumps. They used to do this at Leadville days and I don’t recall the races being cancelled because of visibility but this might have been getting close. Any way if my math is correct this may have been going on when the so called “bomb cycle” hit the Midwest and caused all kinds of flooding. We wrote on this blog back on March 26th that the Orphan Grain Train was collecting stuff for disaster assistance in Jamestown – please check that out if you can help because disaster response is a long slog.
I was thinking several things when I saw this picture. One was that I remember delivering papers in this kind of snow and how the paper bag would fill up between houses. I had to take the bag off at the end of each block because it was full of snow and the papers were getting wet. People would get furious with me if their paper was wet. I could not for the life of me figure out how to walk with a paper bag full of newspapers in a storm like this and keep the papers dry. I would try and take one paper and open it up to cover the ones in the front, but the bag in the back was also full of papers and that was hard to keep them covered. The other problem was that open paper had a tendency to blow away and I was only given 5 extra papers each day and I think I had to pay for those. The idea of the extra papers was that some might get dropped in the mud or blow away and maybe, just maybe someone would buy one from you as you trudged through a snow storm and over the snow banks. No one ever came and asked to buy a paper in the summer, I can’t imagine they would want one in the middle of a snowy bomb cyclone. Today I see that they have individual plastic wraps for each newspaper. We didn’t have that back in the day and I think if we did we paper boys, (there were no paper girls, sorry), would have had to individually wrap them before we went to deliver. That would have meant that papers would have been later and we would get yelled at for that too. So I was thinking that every job has it’s technical difficulties.
I was thinking about God sending the rain and the snow on the just and the unjust and what is one person’s bomb cyclone is another persons skiing adventure. One persons curse is another’s blessings.
I was also thinking about what was going on Tuesday of Holy Week. A bomb cyclone is about to hit that will cause a disaster to the enemies of God. The scribes and Pharisees are going to see their plans come to fruition little knowing that their plan will cause the end of everything they hoped to accomplish. There is a hint dropped in the middle of John’s Gospel in chapter 11 where Caiaphas prophesies against a statement made at the Sanhedrin about Jesus that ““If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” Caiaphas says that “you know nothing at all” and it is better that one man die for the people. Read it in John 11:40 -53. Both things happened – the Romans did come and Jesus did die for the sins of the people. The bomb cyclone is a blessing for some and a curse for others. As the week progresses as one of our poets has written the hosts of hell shout and jeer because they believe that Christ is finished but Easter happens. What they thought was a great boon or blessings became their ultimate curse,
Every job has it’s technical difficulties and as we see in the Gospel lessons Jesus was trying to teach people who knew nothing. On Holy Tuesday he says the same thing that Caipahas says as prophet. After blistering theological conversations with the religious leaders Jesus says, “you know nothing at all. You know nothing of the Scriptures or the power of God”.
The ultimate curse of the cross becomes the ultimate blessing of forgiveness and mercy for those who will come to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified.
