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[UPDATE 6/28: Lightning Strikes Parthenon]

H/T to Kim, gibby62, Christine and TBC for tips to and insights on this story.

Check out this slow-motion video by Craig Shimala of lightning striking Chicago’s three tallest buildings last Wednesday evening, June 23rd. (The shot above is a screen capture about 16 seconds into that 40-second video.)

Native Chicagoans, please correct me if I’m wrong, but the video appears to have been shot from somewhere west of downtown. From left to right the three buildings are the: Hancock, Trump and Willis (formerly Sears) towers.

The story blossomed as only two simultaneous strikes — an event rare enough to garner worldwide attention. The UK Daily Mail was one of the first to run with those shots (it being the wee hours in the UK when they went on the wire). The story’s spread seems to have resulted from professional AP-wire shots (i.e., readily accessible) having been taken from the third building as it was being struck (or else within milliseconds).

Last Thursday, June 24th, Blair Kamin at the Chicago Tribune blog discussed the opinion of Tribune photo experts that the strikes were, in fact, simultaneous and the photos valid. Here’s the story behind them:

Tribune photographer Chris Sweda headed to the John Hancock Center skydeck to snap a few shots of the official debut of the Trump Tower spire [as] a supercharged storm broke over Chicago.

Chris got the assigned shots as the spire turned from red to blue to white… but he got something much more powerful: A rare shot of lightning bolts simultaneously striking the Trump Tower and the Willis Tower…

At first I thought the reflection on the Trump was the third lightning strike but I now suspect it was from the fading sunset. Still unsure on that. See Kamin’s inadvertently prophetic words from an article two days prior (Tuesday, June 22nd):

If all goes as planned, the spire atop Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower will finally light up Wednesday night, joining the city’s other skyline giants in a blaze of cloud-scraping color.

Shortly after sunset at 8:29 p.m., newly-installed, energy-efficient LED lights will illuminate the spire atop the riverfront hotel and condominium tower, which is Chicago’s second-tallest building. They will color the 227-foot-tall spire in red, white and blue, honoring Independence Day. The color scheme will continue through July 11.
…
The lighting of the spire will mark the final completed element of the Trump skyscraper, which was first occupied in early 2008. All that’s left to truly launch the tower is a grand opening ceremony attended by its namesake, the developer and reality TV star Donald Trump.

Note that this was the first lighting of the Trump building’s spire, and that it was done in honor of American Independence Day. Donald Trump, of course is the legendary, almost iconic embodiment of what one might summarize as American ‘attitude’ — on multiple levels — an attitude not dissimilar from that of ‘economic’ Babylon (e.g. see Revelation 18, Jeremiah 50, and Isaiah 13).

Within an hour after the human lighting, lightning from heaven struck 3X at once.

The day the celebratory red-white-and-blue lighting at the Trump is scheduled to stop, July 11th, marks a New Moon. It is also the one-year anniversary of BHO’s dark “and on the 73rd-day I will rest” anointing in Ghana. (Note that Ghana just beat the U.S. in soccer, 1-0 at the World Cup.) As I wrote last year:

If July 11th, 2009 began a new era after BHO’s self-proclaimed second ‘hundred’ days then what do we make of that same day coming exactly seventy-seven hundred days after maitreya’s appearance in Kenya, at least near, and possibly by BHO himself?

This year July 11th also the last day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz. The notorious month of Av begins the next day, July 12th, at sundown.

Even the normally staid and secular, so-far-left-leaning they might as well lie down and make themselves more comfortable National Public Radio seemed to sense something serious in the rare, simultaneous lightning strikes. Here is the ‘take’ of NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon yesterday:

No doubt those two great lightning bolts were caused by an atmospheric discharge of electricity inside the thunderstorm. But Wednesday was also the day that a jury heard audio of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich muse with an aide that, as governor of President Obama’s home state, the U.S. Senate seat it was in his power to appoint [sic] just might convince the president to name Blagojevich ambassador to India. Maybe that’s why lightning struck.

Wednesday was also when the Canadian earthquake struck (~8 hours earlier), ~182 miles from the G8 summit site that began the next day (see here, here & here).

Right in between those two events, at ~6:15PM EDT, an unusual tornado struck Midland, Ontario, just 55 miles from the G8 summit site near Huntsville, about a third of the way towards Toronto, where the G20 summit was held over the weekend. (An extra H/T to Kim on that part!) The tornado struck within yards of King Street.

I hope I don’t need to point out that tornadoes are pretty rare in Canada — certainly more so than they are down here in the States. Having a significant earthquake and a tornado occur within four-and-a-half hours of one another, at sites straddling the site of a major confab of world leaders is just plain weird.

TWO TOWERS

The two towers featured in the AP photos immediately bring to mind two other high towers struck almost nine years ago in New York.

The former Sears tower, is now named Willis, which means “son of William”. William, in turn, means “resolute protector”. Thus Willis means son of resolute protector. Can y’all think of a very special and unique Son of THE Resolute Protector? How about one who was struck?

And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’ But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” (Matthew 26:30-32; same scene recounted in Mark 14:27-28)

“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me,” declares the LORD of hosts.”Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered…” (Zechariah 13:7)

Trump I take literally, in the sense of Yahweh “holding the trump card” over all the creations and machinations of fallen mankind. With a world-news-making strike of the seat of earthly ‘Trump’ power, the Father seems to be saying: trump that!

In Revelation 11 we read of two witnesses. The inanimate towers in Chicago are by no means those two Tribulation witnesses but, like the twin towers in NYC that fell on 9-11, they may well be a harbinger of them:

3 And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. 4 These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. 5 And if anyone would harm them, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes. If anyone would harm them, this is how he is doomed to be killed. 6 They have the power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague, as often as they desire.

Here’s what I find allegorically richest in all of this. Without the Shimala video (which seems to have received much less coverage than Chris Sweda’s still photographs) we wouldn’t know about the third simultaneous lightning strike.

Most people still don’t.

As a nation, most are still standing eagerly at the proverbial plate, thinking it was only two strikes. Most still have their optimistic economic baseball bat firmly in hand, all muscled-up from our top-5% on the food-chain, high-protein diet (plus a little pharmakeia) thinking they/we have another swing… another chance… that the Cosmic Umpire had not called “yer out!” already, after countless fouls.

It doesn’t matter any more that, in our own minds, we’re just one bad pitch away from an easy walk. We’re out. We just haven’t accepted it yet. A cloud of witnesses watches on the proverbial heavenly ‘TV’, waiting for the more arrogant and God-denying among us to figure out that no matter how many botox treatments one receives, or how much organic food one consumes, or how often one goes to the gym, the flesh of every one of us is destined for the ultimate dug-out… six feet down. The only question that really matters, in the long run, is where we end up afterward.

That ‘invisible’ strike — i.e., the one the Tribune photographer didn’t see coming because it was over-his-head (literally, but I also believe, allegorically) — hit the John Hancock Center while he was on assignment to cover an early 4th-of-July celebration on the Trump.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…

It’s tempting — very tempting – to read the above and slot our current president in the role of King George III of England. Yet I encourage you to read it from God’s perspective. How does he view our “long train of abuses”? Our “usurpations”? The evidence of our systematic design (individually and as a nation) to shunt Him aside? As the Reverend Billy Graham once quipped, “If God doesn’t judge America, he’s going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.” It is His right, it is His duty — in the interest of His Divine justice — to bring this nation to judgment.

Interestingly, on March 22, 2007 (a notorious annual day of significance in occult circles), “a rare 1823 copy of the Declaration of Independence sold at auction for $477,650 by a man [Michael Sparks] who found it last year in a Nashville thrift store for $2.48.” It’s not clear if that was a record. The digits of the sale price add up to 31 — the number of Deity. The news broke the next day, March 23rd. Three years later, BHO signed the health deathcare bill as Anubis sailed into New York harbor. The same copy went on sale again a few weeks into BHO’s first term.

Recall now the last major American summer holiday, Memorial Day, and what seems a clear harbinger around the president’s attempted speech in Elwood, Illinois, cut short by a severe thunderstorm reported as having “come out of nowhere”. Standing alone at the podium under an umbrella but surely drenched anyway (recall that clean water is symbolic of God’s Word)…

President Barack Obama’s Memorial Day observance was stopped in its tracks on Monday [5/31]* by a torrential downpour accompanied by bolts of lightning and booming thunder… he urged the crowd to seek shelter.

“We don’t want to endanger anyone, particularly the children, in the audience. A little bit of rain doesn’t hurt anybody, but we don’t want anybody struck by lightning,” he said from the podium, the storm so loud his words could barely be heard through the amplifiers… After the aborted event at the cemetery, Obama drove back toward Chicago…

*Recall that 5/31 was the day of the Israel-threatening Gaza flotilla which ‘O’ must have known about, but chose not to thwart.

SUMMARY:

What then are we to make of the super-crazy-rare occurrence of “three strikes” simultaneously on three separate Babel-like structures in BHO’s hometown in a fashion that seems to amplify the harbinger behind his aborted Memorial Day speech?

Three strikes… one on a structure symbolic of American pride and arrogance (Trump) and its foremost formative holiday (July 4th), another symbolic of the struck Son of the Resolute Protector whom this country fails to acknowledge as it once did (Willis) and the third (unseen and “over our heads”) on a structure bearing the name of the most prominent signatory of America’s Declaration of Independence (also July 4th)?

On the eve of the global G8 summit.

A few hours after the rare tornado…

…and the earthquake, even closer to its main site.

All on the same day, within a few hours driving distance of the G8.

While the gulf oil continues to spill…

…and a tropical storm (Alex, which means “protector of mankind”) crosses into the Bay of Campeche — the forgotten site of one of the biggest Israel-related judgments on this hemisphere back in 1979, potentially squeezing us from the south and slopping more oil on our coast a few days after BHO meets with the Saudi king to whom he felt it necessary to bow low? …just as the behemoth new financial bill (2000 pages) is thrust through Congress and onto the president’s desk?

I don’t mean to sound like a pompous (much less a pious) know-it-all as if I’ve got it all wired. This barely scratches the surface. Nor do I want to raise any undue alarm. Those of us in Christ should not be afraid — a command, not a request.

But shouldn’t it be pretty obvious by now from the veritable avalanche of harbingers — so numerous, “unlikely” and obvious that even NPR and far-leftist labor leaders are picking up on them — mean that thoughts of business-as-usual (much less proper elections in November) are about as crazy as planning what to eat for breakfast on the Titanic as its deck tilts up to ski-hill gradients in the darkness and gathering spiritual cold? Predicting the moment it will go down is not nearly as important as realizing it is imminent, and why.

You don’t need some crazy Jesus-freak blogger in Boston to interpret this for you. You really don’t. Open your Bible, people. Turn off the TV. Get on your knees now and then. Fergoodnessakes, just close your eyes for ten seconds and talk to the Lord (maybe give him ten more to talk to you). He is as close as your sofa. He doesn’t want you to be on the wrong end of this.

Is that really too much? After He gave you life itself? After he died for you?

I’d love to be wrong about the broad sweep of the judgment that is upon us and about the widespread ignorance and denial that has brought it about and that will suffer under it — I really would. (I’m sure I’m wrong on plenty of the details.) I just no longer see how that is possible. The mountain of sin is piled up too high. The hour is far too late. The signs are too many. If our modern ‘Ninevah’ turns, I won’t sulk like Jonah. I just can’t quite see it at this point.

UPDATE: File these in the freaky-peripheral category, with H/T’s to Ro and Christine on the first one. Short take: two Columbus-related events triangulate on this July 4th.

1) Tuesday, June 22nd, the day before the earthquake, tornado and lightning… “Hopes Fade for 92 Beached Whales“:

Cape Verde islanders have abandoned hope for the survival of 92 pilot whales that were found washed up in a mass beaching. 50 whales were beached on Coqueiro beach, Santiago Island, and another 42 on the Sal Island coast…

Authorities say the reasons for this ‘collective suicide’ will probably never be known although in 1947 a similar incident happened at the same beaches.

Another local said: ‘It is a sign that God has given, but humans can not perceive, at my age, I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Though the modern state of Israel formally came into existence on May 14, 1948 (see video about how the Hebrews count it; with the 62nd anniversary falling on April 19th, the day before Deepwater Horizon blew), the prior year, 1947, is the year many cite (and with good reason) for Israel’s inception and acceptance. What I haven’t seen discussed is the fact that from June 19 to July 4, 1498, Christopher Colubus stopped in the Cape Verde Islands on his Third Voyage to the Americas (the one that got him arrested)… just before he split his fleet and got caught in the African doldrums. Columbus, in turn, is believed by some to be Jewish. As I have noted previously, “His diary makes reference to Isaiah 49 as his primary inspiration, perhaps even Divine call for sailing west.”

What’s funky is that the window we’re in right now (June 19 to July 4) is the 512th anniversary of Columbus’ time in the Cape Verde Islands. As any computer geek will tell you, 512 is two to the ninth power. By Bullinger’s ‘Number in Scripture’ reckoning one could read that is Christ (2) raised to the power of judgment (9).

2) In addition to the Columbus connection (providing a roundabout link back to the Jews, and the Roman, mystery-Babylon church which persecuted them in Spain, forcing Columbus’ departure), this July 4th also marks the 234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The number 234 can be expressed as 2 x 9 x 13. Bullinger makes an overwhelming case for why 13 and ALL MULTIPLES of it, “stand in connection with rebellion, apostasy, defection, corruption, disintegration, revolution, or some kindred idea.”

OK, smarty pants, you may ask… what happened in 1893, on the 117th anniversary of the signing? I.e., 9 x 13? (i.e., judgment x rebellion) Glad you asked…

The World’s Columbian Exposition — also known as The Chicago World’s Fair — was a World’s Fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492. Chicago bested New York City; Washington, D.C.; and St. Louis, Missouri, for the honor of hosting the fair. The fair had a profound effect on architecture, the arts, Chicago’s self-image, and American industrial optimism.

Read “profound… industrial optimism” as doubling-down on Babylon as a source of salvation. This picture from it is especially interesting. Two times 117 is tantamount to saying, Christ (2) x judgment (9) x rebellion 13). In other words, Christ judging rebellion. I’m not much of a date-setter, but as the first Independence Day after BHO’s dark anointing last July 11th, I’d be less surprised about something changing around that time than about something not.

Recall also that Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with the president on July 6th. The last time they were scheduled to meet was around the time of the Gaza flotilla and UN smack-down — a pair of BHO-enabled dirty-tricks that made it prudent for Netanyahu to fly home. (See “Our War With Israel”)

If the same pattern holds, we may be in for an interesting ride. I’m happy that I’ll be far out of town on the 4th, with my family, at a retreat with some dear Christ-following brothers and sisters.

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