There is a basic qualification to be a volunteer Storm Spotter for the National Weather Service, and it is blessedly simple: Look up. Were anything more technical asked of me, I would not have taken the class; but as it is, I already spend a lot of time watching the sky. It turns out that other people do too.
The classroom Tuesday night was full of middle-aged folks who wore camo hats and hiking pants. Some brought their grandchildren with them. I doubt anyone besides the instructor was a meteorologist; we were commonfolk who don’t mind testing the wind, measuring the hail, and watching the clouds mount up and rain down over our backyards. Even so, most there had been doing this far longer than I have, and they seemed to be people who marked time by its weather: “The Flood of ‘08” or “The Jeff City tornado in ’19,” and, of course, “The Joplin Year,” when an EF5 leveled the city the spring I was ten.
The Midwest is a plain where weather types from the four corners come to romp and play. We entertain winds from the North, hurricane rains from the East, heat from the Gulf, and funnel clouds that will sometimes whip off the Western plains. All of this creates a circus for weathermen in Missouri, where winds box each other and weather fronts dance. So they train “spotters” to be their eyes on the ground—farmers, linemen, mothers, kids, and retired guys out mowing their lawns. The more folks they can get looking up, the better chance they’ll have of seeing the storm for what it is.
A good spotter, we learned, pays attention: What is the wind doing? How low are the trees bending? Are twigs snapping? Are the clouds green? Are they rotating, or lowering, or sharpening like the tip of a spinning drill bit?
Flanked by the Ozark Mountains, we don’t exactly lie wide open to tornadoes. Mr. Meteorologist told us that moving clouds are nothing new here. They run to and fro across the Great Plains, and only when the front is right—when hot and cool air crash—do they burst.
But a storm watcher looks up anyway. They look up from their tractor; they stick their head out the kitchen window; they step into the office parking lot to see how fast the clouds are moving. They feel the wind. They listen to the voice of the thunder with a holy fear, like Moses did when he stood at the foot of God’s Mountain, watching the clouds gather and brood. He knew there would never again be a flood of judgment, but only a storm of mercy. God would both reveal his glory to his people and shield them from it, as “there were thunders and lightings and a thick cloud on the mountain” (Ex. 19:16).
And the God of Fire and Storm is not done displaying his glory to crowds of common folks. Like storm spotters on a spring afternoon, the more people who behold him, the more glory we’ll see. I could look around the room Tuesday night to realize that beholding the work of his hands wasn’t just a call for Moses. It is for the farmer, the lineman, the mother, the kid, and me—and it is blessedly simple:
Look up.
“Our God comes: he does not keep silence;
before him is a devouring fire,
around him a mighty tempest.”~ Psalm 50:3
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