Faith: Counting the seconds until the truth that can change world

I can sleep through almost anything, but some things are guaranteed to get your attention.

Recently, my wife and I were sitting at home watching television, and I’m sure I was flirting with drowsiness (since a couch and a TV are almost as conducive to sleep for me as a pillow and a bed), when we were both suddenly jolted as fully awake as we’ve ever been in our lives. Retina-searing light flashed through the room and an ear-drum-splitting boom rattled the pictures on the walls.

It could have been caused by a “flash bang” grenade tossed into our living room by the special forces unit about to take us into custody as our covers as foreign sleeper agents had been blown. It was not.

Could it have been an Air Force F-16 lighting up its after-burner and breaking the sound barrier right above our house?

What about the Second Coming with angels reflecting incredible glory and a trumpet tuned to DE(A)F-CON Infinity?

No.

It was the flash of the brightest lightning and the boom of the loudest thunder I’ve ever seen and heard.

Once I could see again and my ears quit ringing, I looked out the back window. I’d not have been surprised to see a massive elm tree split and collapsing in flames and the back yard and/or my shed beginning to be consumed by fire.

Then I started to try to remember what I’d heard about counting the seconds between a lightning flash and the ensuing bang of thunder to get an approximate distance to the actual lightning. I didn’t remember the formula at the time, but I was pretty sure that “almost no time at all” between flash and bang (and shaking in your boots) would indicate that the lightning was extremely close.

I looked it up later. 

Flash! Count the seconds until the Bang! Divide by 5. The result is the number of miles the lightning is away from you.

Five seconds is one mile; ten seconds is two; and so on. Zero seconds, one website calmly indicated, is “very close.”

If you get the opportunity to see such a flash and hear such a bang and utterly fail in counting to zero between them, I wish you luck in remaining calm.

But the math will be either easy (if you round) or difficult (if you split seconds), and I very much doubt you’ll be thinking much about math.

In Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 9, Jesus and his disciples are coming back to their home-base of Capernaum, and he’s drawing near to his suffering and death on the cross, when he asks them, “What were you arguing about back on the road?”

“What? Us argue?”

St. Mark tells us that they were very quiet because they were ashamed. He says they’d been arguing about “who was the greatest.”  

And that’s when their Lord — the selfless Servant who will soon be washing the feet of these squabblers, the suffering Servant who will soon give his life to save us — will drop a truth-bolt of lightning into their midst: “Anyone who wants to be first among you must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:35).

It seems that Christ’s flash-bang of truth was something the feuding apostles never forgot. And, if the intensity of the glory-light and the truth-reverberations of those amazing words don’t grab our attention and shake us up, we’ve not thought about them — or the One who said them — very much.

Read them. Listen. You won’t have to count many seconds until you realize you’ve heard truth that can change the world. 

Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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