A few years ago...

[Mr.Ex_Nihilo]

…back when I was living in New Brunswick, considering Catholicism but still technically Lutheran, I was up one night reading through Genesis, the very first chapter.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…

As my wife and son slept (my youngest boy only existed in God’s mind at this time), I read through the entire chapter and part way into the second chapter-- and somewhere along here I thought in prayer to God, “God, is this for real?”

No sooner did I complete my inward prayer when – boom – a straight lighning bolt shot down from the sky off into the fields of Midgic about perhaps 3 kilometers away. I am not making this up-- the lightning bolt was totally straight and without any little jagged electrical forks one normally sees with lightning bolts.

I sat there in my living room, my eyes moving in awe back and forth several times from the bible in my hands to night sky outside the picture window. I was kind of shocked for a few moments wondering if I just imagined seeing and hearing this.

Then I quickly got up and looked out the picture window. There were two faint nearly transparent cirrus clouds to either side of my nightime view, neither one in anyway close to the perspective where I saw the lightning bolt come down.

I then went outside, looking around for some sign of some kind of thunder coud which could have produced it-- and there was nothing even close to a cloud which could have generated it.

To this day I still wonder about this event. I might sometime walk out there and see if I can find a very straight fulgurite that may have been preserved in the soil.

Note : Fulgurites (from the Latin fulgur meaning thunderbolt) are natural hollow carrot-shaped glass tubes formed in quartzose sand or soil by lightning strikes. In the right kind of sand the extreme heat generated will form silica glass shapes that trace the path of the lightning. The structures are also known as Petrified Lightning.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Anybody ever have somrthing like this happen to them?

 

[Mr.Ex_Nihilo]

um…anybody?

 

[alexaustralia]

You don’t need clouds to get lighting … electrical discharge can happen from the ground up, from the sky down (cloud or no cloud) and from the sky upwards (one layer of the atmosphere to the next). Ofcourse the thicker the atmosphere the more friction the greater the charge.

 

[Sabda]

My dh lived in South Dakota for a number of years and he saw two really strange things while he was there. One was there were no clouds but it was snowing. Two was again no clouds but there was tornado. Weather can be a really strange thing.

 

[Iraneaus]

Personally, no. I can relate a story of my father’s though. When my father was young I think around 10-12. He prayed for a sign that he was real. He asked god that if he was real to let lightning strike the large tree on the side of the house.

As it turned out in the middle of that very evening the whole house was awoken by a thunderous crash. The tree had not only been hit by lightning, but it was scorched and split a good ways down this very large tree.

My father actually kept a piece of the tree after it was cut down and still has it to this day.