This morning, while checking my feed on Facebook, I came across another article claiming the world is coming to an end. In the article, Christian group predicts the world will be ‘annihilated’ on Wednesday, the group claims that they have calculated the date and even though they had been wrong in the past, and there is a reason October 7, 2015, is the day that the world will end.
McCann believes that Camping’s 21 May 2011 prediction did have some truth, however. That day was declared to be “judgment day” because it was the day God stopped the process of selecting which churchgoers will survive Wednesday’s massacre, McCann said.
Following 21 May 2011, God turned his attention to deciding which non-churchgoers to save, according to McCann. The eBible Fellowship believes that God said he would devote 1,600 days to this task – bringing us to 7 October 2015.
My first reaction was one of laughter and just shaking my head. I started to think how can anyone take Christians serious when we have people like this out there representing us. After all even Jesus told us that he did not know the day the world was going to end. So if Jesus did not know how could we, mere mortals, figure it out. And if God could create all of well, creation, in six days why would it take him 1,600 days to figure out who he was going to save. I mean Santa Clause does all of that in one night, and he delivers toys!
Then I attended the quarterly training meeting of the Massachusetts Corps of Fire Chaplains. At the start of the meeting we always have a little devotional time and this time our, Chief Chaplain led it. He spoke of this same article I had read earlier in the day and came to some of the same conclusions. I stole that Santa Clause line from one of my fellow chaplains by the way. But then the tone of his devotion changed.
For some people, he reminded us, the world as they know it will come to an end today and tomorrow and the day after. Some will die. Some will lose loved ones. Some marriages will end. And for some of the people we serve, they will die saving others. The world ended for a group of sailors out to sea during the most recent hurricane, and some died just trying to get a better education for themselves and their families. You see the world is ending for each one of us.
I sat there for a moment and thought about those words and was mindful of the souls for whom this would be their last day, not gone in some apocalyptic end of the world but because of a drug overdose or cancer or old age or an accident of some kind and I said a little prayer for each of them.
The time we have on this earth is limited, and none of us know when it will end. How are we spending those days? Are we truly loving God and loving our neighbor or are we caught up in some nonsense and caring only for ourselves.
So it is 9:30 pm on Wednesday and, although there are still a few hours left in the day I do not think the world is coming to an end today. Maybe tomorrow…
