I heard from a couple of people recently, musing on the awful floods, that there'd been some kind of prophecy about flooding in London which came out last year. Doing a web search turned it up easily enough, the link is at
and the group of people who had met to pray felt that God was asking them to say the following
“We see the need to warn and to prepare for major flooding from the Thames - covering significant areas of the London flood plain - inclusive of the financial centre of the city. It is foreseen that this will be of sufficient magnitude to cause damage and destruction to property - necessitating the relocation of people from the area. There would be an attendant risk of injury and even loss of life, in flooding of this nature. Consequential to this would be disruption to residential, governmental and commercial life in the affected areas. The urgency we feel in the release of this is communication is due to our belief that the above events are imminent”.
This was all about 17 months ago, and I'm reluctant to call an 'act of God' floods that have
happened 100 miles to the West and somewhat later than predicted. Mind you, if warnings of floods had been taken seriously, say, 17 months ago, then that might have enabled more to be done to protect the people who've suffered this week. I'm also with the Archbishop of York who noted that the real acts of God were the acts of service and help offered by normal people to their needy neighbours.
It takes a lot of guts (or, strangely, humility - you have to be prepared to look foolish), to go public with something like this, because once you're on record, your reputation goes on record too. At the same time, it begs the question of what we think of God. Does He still speak to nations (as He does in the Bible), or mainly to individuals? If so, how - to rebuke, warn, guide, and how on earth would we know anyway?
Stranger still, due for release into cinemas in a week or two is Evan Almighty, the sequel to Bruce Almighty, in which an American congressman is told by God, in person, to build an ark in the middle of the US mainland. Cue lots of animals, and (I assume), water. It's interesting to muse on how animals and humans have coped with the floods. The animals can move into another field, and it becomes home pretty much as the last one did. We humans, meanwhile, have built our physical roots into the soil with concrete and bricks, and are so anchored to a particular bit of earth that we can't relocate quite so easily, and as a result lose nearly every possession we have.
Another picture stuck with me from last nights news - a bit of rail track with all the subsoil washed away, so that it literally hung over space. The floods ask the question of what our lives are built over, what happens when those things are eroded and swept away. Back to the gravestones in Harry Potter - where your treasure is, there is your heart also. If your treasure is washed away....
Praise God the waters are receding, lets continue to pray for better weather, and for those whose homes have been deluged.
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