Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Good vibrations
There are a few things in life that I've always wanted to experience. Natural disasters are one of them. Don't ask me why, but I've always thought it would be cool to experience a tornado, hurricane, or earthquake, only without the disastrous consequences that so often follow.
Well, in the the early hours of Friday, April 18, I got to experience just that!
I was sound asleep in bed in my apartment. And then, for seemingly no reason, I woke up, and I soon realized that I was feeling a shaking sensation. Thinking that it was me and I had just had a nightmare or something, I tried to stop myself from shaking by clutching my body. No good - the shaking continued.
In the span of about the next 3 1/2 seconds, I processed ... Yes, I was awake. No, I wasn't dreaming. Yes, I was in Indiana. No, Indiana doesn't have earthquakes. But yes, it seemed like everything around me was definitely vibrating!
About 10-15 seconds later, the shaking stopped, and I went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was a little unsure of what exactly I had experienced that night. Nothing in my apartment was out of place. I watched the weather on TV, and they didn't say anything about an earthquake. I thought I was going crazy.
Well, when I arrived at Keynote that morning, I soon learned that I was not crazy! The talk of the morning was the tremors that shook central Indiana the night before. Everyone was abuzz with stories of what their earthquake experience had been like. As you probably know, it turned out that a 5.2 quake had occurred in southeastern Illinois, and we felt the tremors that had rippled out from it. Relieved that I hadn't completely lost my mind, I shared with them my experience, which I just told to you.
But wait, there's more!
A little later that morning, around 11:00 or 11:30, a few of us were sitting around a table, on which we had placed our cups and water bottles at that time. All of a sudden, I saw the water bottles on the table start to wobble. Thinking that someone had just carelessly bumped the table, I looked around. No one was touching the table. Then, as if there were someone in the basement banging on the floorboards directly underneath my chair, I felt vibrations beneath me.
"Aftershock!" I said. People around me laughed. "Oh, yeah right," they teased. And then it stopped. I looked around, not as sure of my sanity anymore, and I finally spotted Tom sitting across the room with a quizzical look on his face.
"Did you feel that?" I asked. He nodded, "The lights were swaying." Again relieved that I hadn't totally lost my marbles, I gave the "I told you so" look to my table-mates, who had been oblivious to the whole thing. Only a few people that day felt that ever-so-small aftershock. (And actually, there were several more very small tremors over the next couple days that others felt, and I didn't!)
And that's not all!
Now, this part gets kinda weird. It occurred to me after this experience that last Thursday night before I went to bed, I was reading my Bible. More specifically, I was reading 1 Kings 19, which contains this passage in verses 10-12:
"[Elijah] replied, "I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too."
The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by."
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper."
Less than six hours after I read that, the ground beneath me began to shake. Is that cool, or what?! I'm not exactly sure what to think about that yet, but I do think it's a pretty awesome story!
Well, that's about all the ground-shaking news I've for you now! Until next time, this is Josh signing out! |
