The sky is an endless mystery — because it’s just that: endless.
It grants flashes and shimmerings, affords us the regular positioning of stars and planets, blazes brilliantly with the sun, which sometimes pulses strangely, or sets deeply at night, away from artificial light, and often bears surprises.
At the top we see how active and different the same parcel of sky can be, as in 2009, when, noted a news item, “auroras and meteors haunted skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Trumosø, Norway.
Shimmers. Flashes of light.
Such is life on earth and above the earth: mysteries wrapped in ambiguities (or as the saying goes, “conundrums”). There were the signs in the sky throughout the Old Testament. In the New, there was the star of Bethlehem. Often the sky is vague, nubilous. One great clarity: the Infant.
Sometimes, lights in the sky — closer to earth, luminosities in the atmosphere — are said to serve as the presage for earthquakes: the culmination of terrestrial electrical charge. Even without the supernatural element (which often seems to underlie terrestrial phenomena), earth and its surroundings offer us much to ponder.
Last week, mysterious blips appeared across radar in southern Illinois and western Kentucky. They may have come from military aircraft, though nearby Air Force bases say they had nothing to do with it. Said a report: “The storm-like blips left the National Weather Service in a state of confusion since it wasn’t raining in the region.” Social media users speculated the culprit may have been debris from passing meteors or even a flock of birds.
One viewer, Victor Negron, says: “Having read the story about the mysterious blips that showed up on radar in the Kentucky/Illinois area, I wondered whether they were actually disturbances that radar picked up as a result of pre-earthquake activity. Recall that the New Madrid Fault Line is right under the area where the blips were noted. I’m neither an earthquake expert, nor a radar expert, but wonder whether that, the change in the uncharted Arctic, and the near-pass comet that is approaching earth are interrelated?”
It is interesting (and perhaps only interesting) that the greatest recorded quakes in the “lower 48” were along the New Madrid fault line. Many geological actions taking place, including indications, in Italy, that Mount Vesuvius may one day soon be in for another historic eruption. (As for the comet, it is now past.)
The 4.4 magnitude quake was also felt in Tennessee and as another newspaper put it, “had some in the region wondering what the chances are of a big one hitting the St. Louis area or Southern Illinois. Any time an earthquake large enough to be felt happens, stories of a series of quakes in 1812 on the New Madrid fault are told, especially since that area of Tennessee rarely experiences tremors.”
Confluences occur as a result of the simple workings of nature — as well as arriving as signs. There are the mysteries right here on the surface. In a part of Chicago, also last week, residents reported an inexplicable “hum.” Mysterious — or simply a massive air circulation unit on a building’s third-floor garage?
Also right here on terra firma: In California an image that Catholic passersby near Holy Family Church in Artesia took to be Mary of Guadalupe appeared on the feast day of Guadalupe. That timing — that confluence — argued, to some (including us), for authenticity: It was spotted by those Catholics right after attending a Mass commemorating the Mexican apparition. You can decide for yourself. The “image” is below. Moreover, noted KTLA TV, “On the first day, the image was contained within a puddle that never fully evaporated despite bright, sunny weather, [a witness] said. (The church provided media with the photographs — a rarity at a time when such images are usually seen by too many as points of jocularity.)
Said the news station: “The puddle remained the second day, then on Friday the water disappeared and the likeness became more pronounced, according to the pastor.”
Is it yet another case of what we can’t see inflecting itself upon what we can?
One day, perhaps soon, it will be clear to us.
[resources: books on prophecy]