It’s Judgment Day! If you’re reading this, that means you haven’t ascended to heaven and you aren’t a true believer. So, what’s next for ye of little faith?
At 2:59 p.m. is when Harold Camping, the 89-year-old evangelist, president of Family Radio and foreseer of apocalypses (this is his third prediction) has declared that the world will begin to end.
The date and time are based on his own mathematical calculations and he and his followers have spent an unholy amount of money on advertisements and billboards in an effort to warn God’s children.
If you’re like me, you’re probably watching saved souls rise while the ground is beginning to shake. These are the earthquakes that will destroy the world. Crouching beneath a desk or doorway won’t save the unsaved and about this time, I’m realizing that calling this thing The Rapture is a huge misnomer. It’s too late to join Christ’s VIP club now.
No time for regrets for the end is imminent and will last five months, until October, which is too bad because I was really looking forward to spending some time at the beach this summer. It would make a lot more sense if it happened during winter, or not at all, but I’m not the shot-caller.
Despite my criticisms of the timing and of the entire event, acceptance takes over; I will embrace it. An end to war, an end to pain, an end to the daily struggle of survival and the bigger battle of attaining happiness and peace, and good riddance. I was tired of fighting. I see now why doomsday has so many groupies . . . what a relief!
It is so much easier to be pious when the world and all of its sinful possibilities don’t exist. Heaven is so . . . safe. And a new world free from hedonistic people like me, while boring, probably would be more moralistic.
Goodbye to everything and everyone. Goodbye Mother Earth, who birthed humanity, fed us, clothed us, provided a beautiful setting to inspire our imagination. But she has also terrorized us with her storms, her natural disasters, her moody weather and inhospitable climates, giving us plagues, disease, starvation and death in equal doses throughout the whole of human existence.
It seems that the world is in a perpetual state of ending. The end of the world seems to be a millennium-long event. For the people who perish in each of Gaia’s death throes, the world did end.
If only I had access to an apocalypse-proof shelter to see if there are any other survivors of this much-anticipated—and seemingly beloved—life-ending event. Will some animals survive? Has God wiped us out to make room for heartier life forms, like cockroaches and parasites? Planet of the tapeworms?
What kind of world will be left when all this is over? Nothing, or a barren and desolate landscape, or a veritable Garden of Eden, a place returned to beauty and vivaciousness, free of the destruction of parasitical humans, roaming around consuming and polluting, and doing it in God’s name, only for God to return the 200 million or so he saved to his paradise to start the cycle over again?
It’s sad we will never know what is to become of our home. The fate that awaits us non-believers is even worse. But at least everyone will be dead or gone. And as a Californian, I’m ready for the earthquakes, bring them on.
Now as the earth heaves and groans, I crouch in my doorway not in a bid for salvation, but to kiss my butt goodbye. I think about the laughter and love and light that blessed my lifetime. However, I can’t fight off the tinge of jealousy that has gripped my heart, jealousy of Camping, and the souls he saved. No doubt the man is not only righteous, but a genius for figuring out the equation for Armageddon.
If only I had accepted Jesus, if only I shed all my other esoteric and spiritual interests, if only I had stopped doing yoga and reading about Native American, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. Why hadn’t I focused on Christianity and more importantly, just this one man’s prediction? Now I will have to endure months of horrible agony due . . .
Oh, wait. False alarm! My bad. Forget all that stuff I said. At least for now the world goes on, with all its awesomeness and awfulness, at least for about 3 billion more years when our entire galaxy is swallowed by our cannibal neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.
Until then, or at least until my own demise, the only thing left to do is enjoy the ride.
