This Is The End...Not

Hmmm….so the Rapture or second coming or end of the world as we know it, as prophesied by mere mortal and Family Radio's head honcho Harold Camping, didn't happen.

Just as I suspected.

Not that I don't expect Jesus to return someday or that Judgment Day is a real event. I do. I just never believed it would happen this past Saturday simply because some old geezer with a microphone twisted the Bible to fit his own agenda and said so. By the way, Harold, in Biblical terms it's never a good thing to be thought of as a false profit or practicing Heretic.

But two days after the world clearly didn’t end the man is still too stubborn to back down. Not only was a retraction not issued, or at least a mea-culpa uttered under his breath, we didn't even get a sincere "Just kidding." Nope. All we got was another end date.

Instead of May 21, the new and improved Judgment Day is slated to occur five months from now, on Friday, October 21. You see, the first date was just a slight miscalculation. Stuff happens. But this one Harold has -again- guaranteed. So mark your calendars. It'll be here before ‘ya know it. And hey, think of all the money we'll save not having to buy Halloween candy this year. Woot-woot! Goodness, doesn't this man get it?

But just like this past weekend the same thing is going to happen come October. Life will go on and Christians all over the country will once more be subject to ridicule, lumped in with this old fool and his loony followers. Late night TV hosts and atheists everywhere will again have a field day mocking and ripping our beliefs. Once again, it’ll be open season on the faithful. And once more the Lord's name gets universally dragged through the mud. Thank you very much, Harold Camping.

Now, I don't suppose or pretend to know when Jesus will come back. All I know for sure is someday he IS coming back. But I won’t be hearing about it first on Family Radio- or any other outlet. However as a deep thinker, which for my purposes is someone who loses sleep worrying about problems that don’t actually exists, Camping's end of the world prediction had me brooding all night.

I call myself a practicing Christian and believe, to the core of my being, that I’m saved because Jesus died on the cross for my sins. But as my brain kept turning this "prophesy" over in my head, I wondered if I've lived right enough, my faith strong enough to preserve my salvation. I wondered if His grace was enough. What if October 21 comes- or whenever Judgment Day really is-and Jesus comes, but I don't have enough of the right spiritual stuff for to be taken back to Heaven with Him?

What if I get left behind?

I imagined waking up October 21 in the same bed shared with the lovely Amy, but finding she’s not there. Not in the shower. Not in the kitchen. Not in the living room. No place. Next I checked the garage and noticed her car there but she wasn’t. Anyplace. The cats were still there, and I watched traffic move down our street like any other morning but, somehow, between going to bed and waking up, the world had drastically changed.

All I got when I called the in-laws was the answering machine. So I called the brother-in-law. But again, at 7:30 on a workday morning, nobody picked up the phone. It just rang and rang until going to voice mail. Next I called Pastor Sam. But nobody answered at his house either. Weird. Quickly I got dressed and decided to drive to work. Somebody HAS to be there. After all, I'm blessed to be working at a 24/7 Christian radio ministry, on the air coast-to-coast and streamed worldwide. As I get out to Highway 49, I’m transitorily reassured to hear K-love on the radio and commuting with other drivers during the hour between home and office.

But occasionally channel surfing I keep hearing breaking news accounts of millions of people suddenly missing. The Rev. Billy Graham. Actors Kirk Cameron and Chuck Norris. Pro athletes Andy Pettitte and Kurt Warner. Sngers Michael W. Smith and Rebecca St James. All gone. Along with countless other souls who’ve suddenly and mysteriously turned up missing. Other bulletins were coming in, too, with terrifying reports of catastrophic earthquakes rattling all parts of the globe, and swarms of F-5 tornadoes, flash floods and other natural disasters occurring in this country as well. Listening to the alarmed announcers detailing one disaster after another, one would think the world had ended.

At work, my key card allowed me into the office and, as usual, the first thing I heard was the sound of our station playing over the internal intercom. It seemed like any other workday morning. Except I'd walked into an empty building. The on-air studio, the news and production rooms- they were all vacant. In the lobby, all the phone lines were lit up with incoming calls, but nobody was at the front desk to answer them. It was eerie.

Alarmed, I went quickly back to my desk and called my supervisor but, like everyone else I’d tried to reach that morning, could only raise his voice mail. Frantically, I placed calls to several other colleagues, but again, only got their voice mail. As the sound of our station kept playing in automation, I wandered the halls looking for another living soul. Anybody. But the only creatures drawing breath on our expansive campus were the lizards in the well-tended ground cover outside. Everybody at K-love is a Christian. I am too. But I guess my co-workers all led better lives than me because my search for a friend came up empty. In an office occupied by nearly 300 people on any given work day, I found myself completely alone.

I knew the music on the radio would play on its own for another week or ten days, depending on how far in advance it'd been programmed. But there'd be no d.j.'s or news breaks; just the control room computer segueing seamlessly from song to song to spot break and back to song, all on its own, and with no human intervention. The daily logs would run out at some point, though, the computer would stop and all 200 stations across the K-love Radio Network would go silent. Forever.

Just like the office. No talking, laughing or friends and co-workers moving about. Nobody getting coffee in the break room. Nobody having meetings. I was alone. I wanted to call Amy, to hear a friendly voice and tell her what was going on. But then I quickly remembered. She wouldn’t be answering her cell. So I wandered in shock back to the workspace I share with three other people. Like everyone else, they were missing in action, too. I looked around the room then stared out the window. Taking a deep sad breath, I picked up a few personal items off my desk (for reasons I can't quite figure out) and left the building, likely for the last time.

Driving home again, everything looked as it did when making the same drive the evening before. There was plenty of traffic, stores were open; people were coming and going. But the world had become a foreign place. Everybody I knew and loved and cared about had been taken from me and I was the only one left behind in a land of non-believers, wondering how I screwed up my eternal salvation and wondering how to go on living. Or even wanted to go on living. I knew doing myself in would surely condemn me to eternal damnation, but what the hell. What else would there be to look forward to?

Fortunately, I didn't have to devise a way to take myself out because my eyes blinked open. During all my ‘deep thinking’ I must've drifted off for a few seconds. Or the rest of the night. As always Amy was still by my side. It was dark outside, but the world was apparently no different than it'd been before I’d gone to sleep. I closed my eyes again before getting up and thanked God it’d only been a dream. And that my Eternity is secured only in the pages of the Bible and only by His mercy and grace.

Not the false teachings of a whack-job loud mouth 90-year old preacher-man who, when soon standing before Him, is probably gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do.