"I heard that we might get two to three feet of snow!" My patient told me with a shiver in her voice, as though she were getting ready to embark on an Arctic expedition bound for the North Pole.
"I don't think so," I said. "I heard that Roanoke was going to get ten to twenty inches, but only four to six inches here."
"Well, that's great!" She told me enthusiastically. "I don't like snow. They can send it all to Florida for all I care."
As the days churned away since that conversation, the forecast has dwindled. Now, it is for two to three inches of snow, mixed with sleet.
I happen to like snow and wouldn't mind a blizzard, but that is neither here nor there.
More than anything, this conversation brought to mind the fact that weather forecasters are not prophets -- at least not in the Biblical sense of the word. Prophets in the Bible claimed to have messages from God. As such, they were not allowed to be wrong -- the punishment for false prophecy was death by stoning.
I am afraid that we have lost track of the Biblical imperative to speak truth. It is particularly important when we speak things in the name of God.
Over the last couple of years, I have read many things from Christian people that were anything but accurate -- either about the present or predictions of the future. Unlike with meteorologists, it is not enough for Christians to be occasionally right about things that are happening in a couple of days.
We must do better than those forecasters who are not really sure if we will get one or six inches of snow three days before the Winter Storm Izzy.
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