I had an uneventful flight this last week and it’s always fun to see the earth from 30,000 feet. I can only be thankful that my flight included only Chicago and Phoenix and not London or Paris. Thanks to Iceland’s remote volcano Eyjafjallajokull which filled the sky with ash 7 miles high, 100,000 flights were canceled and hundreds of thousands of passengers were literally left sitting in many European airports. The stranded weren’t just the “coach” passengers, but included government officials headed to Poland, an Olympian headed to the Boston marathon, Oxford University bigwigs, and even a New Yorker who had to have her wedding changed from the planned country of France.

“But the impact,” writes Bryan Walsh, of the volcanic crisis went far beyond the inconvenience of stranded vacationers and sprained tongues of newscasters trying to pronounce Eyjafjallajokull.” Kenyan farmers suffered when the fresh flowers they provide to a significant part of Europe couldn’t leave the their continent. Although the price tag was significant for the airlines (estimated 1.2 billion), they were the only ones to suffer, this really had a global effect.

I had realized most of this, but it wasn’t until I saw the title for Bryan Walsh’s article in time magazine that my imagination and even emotions were arrested: “The Cloud That Closed A Continent.” Walsh goes on to comment that this is one more reminder of how vulnerable are world remains. I’m sure you are ahead of me already – “The Cloud That Closed a Continent.” What about the headlines “The Cloud that Will Close the Planet?”

Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. (Luke 21:27) John says that He who sat on the cloud thrust in His sickle on the earth, and the earth was reaped. (Revelation 14:16)

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull was unheard of until it's cloud "closed a continent." That’s what we are all about – living our lives so that the world expects the cloud that will "close" the planet.