By Michael H. Brown

If it was a coincidence it was a good one: there was another storm in a stormy year and it left the nation's capital -- Washington -- in the dark. "Power companies in Virginia, Maryland and the District say the situation is improving by the hour, but officials concede that electricity won't be restored to all of the estimated 1.8 million customers still in the dark until Friday," reports one Washington newspaper today in the wake of Hurricane Isabel (which, thank God, was not nearly as bad as it could have been).

You have seen it all on TV: the schools that have canceled classes, the subways that ground to a halt, the flooding at Annapolis, the sandbags along the Potomac -- near tony Georgetown -- and perhaps most tellingly, the empty government offices.

Coincidence? There are many coincidences -- too many -- and we have to contemplate the fact that this occurred just weeks after cities from New York to Toronto and Detroit went through their own bouts of darkness (as did London less than a week later).

Floods. Darkness. Is God speaking? Are these not warnings in a merciful time when the Lord is allowing events that rattle us but do not cause a massive loss of life?

Praise Him for His patience!

Those who don't believe that the Lord speaks through nature also do not believe much of the Old Testament. For there one finds an absolute abundance of instances in which God allowed famine, plagues, or storms -- or darkness -- because of mankind's transgressions, because of evil from Egypt to Babylon. It's so pervasive that it is a major biblical theme, to be found in Genesis and Exodus and Nahum -- in more books than not -- and also in the New Testament.

Did Jesus not mention natural calamities (Matthew 24, Luke 21)? Did He not mention quakes and pestilence and tempests? Did He not curse a tree that was unfruitful -- causing it to wither-- and was there not a quake at the moment of His death?

The answer is "yes," and the natural events were God's punctuation. What is He punctuating today? What is He saying in the weather that is gyrating and the heat waves and the winter extremes? Is He not calling us back?

And Washington: lo, here He is serious. Here He does not like what He sees. Here He is indicating that unless there are major changes in the course of this nation He will allow events that purify our very infrastructure. This is a city that is in what can only be described as spiritual chaos. The major concern is the economy -- money, along with warfare -- while we continue to kill a million unborn babies each year and while we even continue the truly atrocious practice of partial-birth abortion.

Mr. Bush, where art thou? Where is your voice against abortion? Why is there not as much executive clamor -- as much coming from the bully pulpit -- about abortion as there is about Iraq? You are a Christian, we know, but how can it possibly be that the destruction of a million a year -- far more than died at the World Trade Center -- is not front and center in your priorities?

Mr. Bush, we contributed our support, meager though it might be, to your election. We prayed for you. We prayed for Our Lady of Guadalupe to intervene. We prayed for a pro-life candidate.

And now it has been years -- you are nearly down to the last year of your term -- and so far we have seen very little when it comes to killing children.

Nor can the entire matter be placed solely on the President. In fact, Congress is more to blame -- Congress and a Supreme Court that has veered from a path that is Christian.

Oh, there will be movements to ban the horror of partial-birth. We expect this, especially in the coming election year. But we need to see more. We need to see all abortion spoken about, campaigned against, attacked in every court in this land, and sent to the dustbin of history.

If just half the time and words spent on Saddam Hussein were spent denouncing abortionists -- who since 1973 have killed far more people than Hussein ever did -- we would be done of this national tragedy -- this blemish on American history that is greater even than slavery.

And there are many other issues. Look at this from the Sunday Washington Times:  "The U.S. Circuit Court Judge says a New Jersey school can prohibit a child from distributing pencils to kindergarten and first grade classmates because pencil says 'Jesus loves the little children' with a heart symbol substituted for the word love."

What is this? What kind of a place and court system is it, what kind of society is it, that stops Christ while allowing abortion and smut and lewdness to fill its airwaves, that allows a woman who calls herself Madonna to kiss another woman in front of the entire American public?

Strong words: yes, we know. Strong words in tough times, in dangerous times, at a time when we can expect increasingly strong storms. Gloom and doom? It is reality. It doesn't depress. It energizes. It galvanizes us to prayer. Hope? It springs eternal. When darkness comes it should cause us to wonder why the switch is off and to look for the true Light.

If we don't, know that there are greater storms and that there is much more darkness coming.

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