Matthew 5:45 tell us that it rains on everyone. It doesn't matter how righteous you think you are or how bad you seem to be- everyone is going to have some rainy days and some sunny days. There's no discrimination. But, I'm not sure how Al Gore will interpret what happened in Bagdad yesterday.
The GREEN ZONE was no more! At least for a couple of minutes, it became the WHITE ZONE!
My son spent two tours in Iraq and I got many letters and phone calls about the incredible, impossible heat. I heard about the sand storms that would quickly rip the paint off of anything left in it's wake. But, I never heard about SNOW! Glorbal warming or global cooling?
Maybe just some of that wacky weird weather that is supposed to happen ahead of 2012?
After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday morning, as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people here awoke to something certifiably new. For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad. Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings—delight.
"For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling in Baghdad," said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a 63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area. "When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad," Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of rain. "But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my imagination."
Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around freezing!
We're talking Baghdad and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor visibility. Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but residents of the capital and surrounding areas could remember just hail.
"I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow in Iraq before, and her answer was no," said Fawzi Karim, a 40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad. The next thing you know there will be reports of crop circles: maybe some UFO's.
"This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a lesson from God," Karim said.
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. As of late afternoon, there were no reports of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and upon all the living and the dead.
Maybe Matthew knew what he was talking about. Maybe there will be seventy virgins awaiting us. Maybe, maybe not!
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