These days, when an anti-homosexual Christian leader like George Rekers can discredit his belief system by renting a boy to accompany him on a much-deserved European vacation, perhaps it is welcome news that locally our Christian leaders are upholding the integrity of earnest and effective fundamentalist beliefs.

Monday’s Globe carried a story by Wally Kennedy titled, “Miami turns to prayer group to ‘dissipate’ severe weather.”

It seems the city of Miami, Ok., has an official 911 emergency prayer group that is activated whenever storm clouds gather.  On Monday the group called upon God to override nature and cancel plans for a severe thunderstorm that seemed imminent:

“We don’t pray for it to hit anybody else,” said Glenna Longan, Miami’s emergency management coordinator. “We just want it to dissipate so nobody is hurt.”

Yep. You read that right. Glenna Longan works for the city.  She is a government employee.  And part of her duties, apparently, is to coordinate the petitioning of the Almighty for relief from the arbitrariness of bad weather.

No kidding.

Not that Ms. Longan is alone. The city manager, Huey Long, who some call the Moses of Miami, endorses the idea.  He told KFOR in Oklahoma City this:

I do believe its divine intervention. It’s nothing I could come up with and I certainly take no credit whatsoever for this.

Well, it’s comforting, I suppose, for a politician to give credit to someone else for his successes, even if it would be tempting to say that you had a part in helping to dissipate one of the 44,000 thunderstorms that ravage the Earth each day.

KFOR’s news story also featured a comment from Cynthia Frizzelle, wife of a local pastor, who didn’t want a storm to spoil the town’s Easter weekend this year:

We believe that when it’s a 70% chance and we need it to be a zero that we can say, “Lord, shove the rain off into another day,” and that’s what he did on Saturday and we had a beautiful sunshiny day. We all actually had a sunburn to show from that.

Besides the obvious question as to why Mrs. Frizzelle didn’t pray for a divine SPF of, say, 100%, I am rather excited that locally we now have the ability to conduct an experiment on the efficacy of prayer.

I will grant for the sake of this experiment the prayer warriors’ claim that for more than two years God has protected them from the ravages of floods, ice storms, and tornadoes.

From this day on, we can all monitor the weather of Miami, Ok, and see if the Lord is listening to the faithful of that town and beyond.

As city manager Long told Wally Kennedy:

You need to always be prepared in both the secular and spiritual sense. You don’t know what will happen. The people in this group think God’s got to do something because he’s on the line now.

I like that. “God’s got to do something.”  A statement of faith that can be tested over time.

And if it works, maybe a bunch of us can get together and see if God has any interest in helping us at those local casinos.

Richard Pryor used to do a routine in which one of his crap-shooting characters would say:

If I don’t get a seven, there aint no Jesus.

What’s the difference?