Atlanta is weather obsessed. Television programming is scuttled multiple times a year for our local stations to give us minute by minute weather updates for hours on end. Whether it is snow, a tornado or a hurricane, we watch the skies and our televisions carefully to be prepared for whatever happens.
Did you know it is easy to combine teaching your child the Bible and helping them learn about subjects like weather at the same time? It can be a lot of fun and increase their Bible knowledge and faith while helping them expand their intellectual knowledge. Weather is a particularly fun subject to use with this kind of learning.
Look online (Check our companion site www.teachonereachone.org) or get some books from your local library on weather and weather experiments. One of the most fun things you can do is build some basic weather tracking instruments, learn about clouds and other weather predictors and then see if your kids can predict the weather better than your local forecaster. (As we all know the chances are pretty great they can on most days!)
While you are learning about weather and experimenting with it, have a treasure hunt through the Bible. What stories have weather elements which play a part in them? From the Ten Plagues to Job to storms on the Sea of Galilee, weather is mentioned numerous times throughout the Bible. Off the top of my head, I can remember hail, storms, tornado/wind storms, sun, drought and rain. Clouds are mentioned several times, too.
After you have found all of the stories, examine what the Bible tells us about the weather situation and how it compares to what normally occurs when that happens. You may want to throw in some lessons about expected weather changing depending on the location around the world (rainfall amounts, etc.) In each instance, does God appear to be using natural weather events to teach faith lessons or does he create a weather miracle to make something happen? Either way, note that God uses things He created like weather to teach us lessons and to cause things to happen He wants to happen.
You will probably realize, some of your weather interpretations of biblical events are somewhat subjective. For example, the hail storm during the Ten Plagues. As far as I know, hail storms could occur in Egypt. God however chose the timing and the intensity of this particular hail storm to show his power over the false Egyptian gods and to move the Egyptians towards releasing the Israelites from slavery. The Bible doesn’t tell us if hail was in the forecast for that day, but it does tell us God was in control of that particular hail storm – unexpected or not.
Have fun with your children learning about the weather and weather in the Bible at the same time. They will learn helpful science skills for school and increase their faith as they are reminded time and time again God is ultimately in control of the world around us.