Living Outside the Stacks

I grew up in the church, in fact, my sisters and I joke that our first stop after the hospital was not home but our family church.  Truth is that we didn’t realize that our childhood was unusual until we moved to Italy and found out that everyone does not attend church 5 or 6 days out of the week.  Seriously, it wasn’t until then that I found out that children don’t have birthday parties in the church basement.  That’s where we always had ours.

As a child, two of the tenets of our belief system that always interested me were Bible prophecy and the return of Christ, partially out of fear and partially out of the sheer wonderment of it all.  Prophecy is scattered throughout the Bible, but the most quoted scriptures come from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation.  Basically, those books foretell various social, financial and natural disasters that will occur prior to the return of Christ for His church (the Rapture).  Reading those books can be difficult to understand on your own but through Billy Graham’s gentle guidance in Storm Warning, the relationship between Bible prophecy and newspaper headlines are made clear.  It must be noted here that this is an update to the 1992 edition by the same name.

Storms have always had a significant meaning in the lives of Christians.  In the Bible, storms are used to represent the troubling times that believers must endure to receive their blessings.  But more than that, Billy Graham explains that these storm warnings are God’s way of telling people that we must return to the gospel before it’s too late.  As an example of warnings going unheeded, Billy Graham points to the people who taunted God and nature during Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina.  Repeatedly, they were warned to move inland before the storms arrived but many people said they’d ride it out, some even chose to “celebrate” the storms at bars only to lose their lives because they chose not to be obedient.

I think the overriding message of the book  is not to fear what is to come but to know and understand that God loves us so much that He warns us to get out of harm’s way and it is up to us to obey and live (eternally through Him) or disobey and die (suffer the consequences for disobedience).

Disclaimer: This book was provided to me courtesy of Thomas Nelson (which is now BookSneeze) free of charge in exchange for a review. This does not in any way influence my review. To purchase the book, you may click on the picture or the link which will take you to Amazon.com.  I do not benefit from your purchase.

I have the research skills of a librarian, the preservation skills of an archivist, the organizational skills of a mother and the domestic skills of a Stepford wife. I have the research skills of a librarian, the preservation skills of an archivist, the organizational skills of a mother and the domestic skills of a Stepford wife. Read more from this author