"Rain, rain on my face. Hasn't stopped raining for days. My world is a flood. Slowly I become one with the mud."

These words from "Flood" were written by the Grammy Award winning Christian contemporary group "Jars of Clay." Its message was an appropriate accompaniment to the weather during the last weekend of February in the northeast.

The Saturday following the President's Day blizzard dawned shrouded in a ghostly fog that hugged the hills and the highways of northern NJ, although dawn is a misnomer. It didn't exactly dawn. It just sort of slowly grew lighter and lighter in successive shades of gray until everything was pale white.

If you were driving, you couldn't see where you were going.

And then to make matters worse, the rains came -- slowly at first -- until finally becoming torrential later in the afternoon. The National Weather Service had estimated the snow cover on the ground to be equal to about two inches of rain. And that was what remained after several days of sunny, 40-degree weather had put a dent in the mountains of it piled high by front loaders.

Rivers were already swollen from the melting snow pack, so the additional 2-3 inches of liquid precipitation that fell caused flooding in many places. Dense fog closed the NJ Turnpike for hours Saturday morning after a huge pile-up of cars. When the rain finally abated Sunday afternoon, the temperature plummeted, turning all of those rain-slicked highways into icy bobsled runs.

It was a code orange weather alert from which not even duct tape could save us.

As a veteran New Jerseyan, I have lived through my share of blizzards, endured at least three droughts and witnessed incredible deluges. I have seen temperatures ranging from -11 to 105. I have watched as a half-mile long wall of swirling water vapor descended from a steel-gray sky and raced towards my home, lifting the treetops into its huge vortex and, fortunately, dissipating several miles to the east without ever actually touching down.

I remember the blizzard of 1993, when the only thing visible from my living room window was the street lamp on the corner illuminating a horizontal onslaught of wind-driven snow in its eerie halogen vapor light.

And I remember dancing for joy in the street one summer evening in the middle of a thunderstorm that proved to be a drought buster, ending another severe spate of dry weather more than a decade ago.

When nature gets ugly, there's very little we mere mortals can do except hunker down and hope the bad weather passes quickly. Meteorologists once tried to see if there were any ways to prevent or at least lessen the severity of hurricanes but this proved to be an exercise in futility.

Insurance adjusters realized this long before the weathermen and coined the phrase "Act of God" for weather-related disasters that were simply too big and too powerful to contend with.

Ironically, it took one of these "Acts of God" to dampen the threat of a level orange terror alert as the weather foiled everyone's plans from Washington, D.C., to Boston -- terrorists included -- even if it was only for a week.

Terrorism has bred fear across America, but the weather has the capacity to breed its own type of fear. And so, Americans took a vacation from the fear of terrorism and instead embraced the fear of God, which might not be all that bad. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom."

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com. Visit our website at www.amyfound.org.