Rapture or Apocalypse? Which Is It?

   It's 2:30 p.m. now and my wife wants to take a nap. I can't believe it! We have only three and a half hours left, and she's going to spend fully 15% of our time left on earth to take a nap!

   I saw Mr. Camping on the news last night. He promised us, without reservation, that the world was ending at 6 p.m. today (Saturday, May 21. In case you are reading this on Sunday or later, I have bad news for you . . .).

   But Mr. Camping left out a crucial piece of information: did he mean Eastern Daylight Savings Time?

   Does God even follow Daylight Savings Time, or, like Indiana, does God stay on Standard Time all year long? And would God follow convention and go by Greenwich Meridian Time, in which case, we're already toast, or does God follow Pacific time? After all, Mr. Camping lives in Oakland, Calif.

   And then, there's another subtle fact that the evening news didn't clarify: is today the Rapture, or the Apocalypse?  I wouldn't expect the liberal, left-leaning, atheistic media to know the difference, but it's a very important distinction.  The Rapture, for those of you who share the liberal godless media's biblical ignorance, is when Jesus returns from heaven and floats somewhere in the ionosphere like a giant spiritual magnet and pulls all true Christians right off the ground (if they're living) and right out of the ground (if they're "asleep in the Lord") and up into the air to join him in Paradise.

  After the Rapture comes the Tribulation, where the godless who were left behind suffer the cataclysmic events that preclude the End of Time.  OR, the Tribulation comes first, and the Rapture afterward, in which case the Christians suffer along with the godless.  Mr. Camping didn't clarify whether he was a pre-millenial or post-millenial.

   This is getting confusing.  If the latter, then the Japanese earthquake and the Tuscaloosa tornado are signs of the end. And if the former, then the earthquake and the tornado are a walk in the park on a Sunday morning compared to what's coming.  Regardless, if the Rapture is today, then I should be getting prepared to be vacuumed into the sky in a couple of hours. Or I should be hoarding canned goods and shotgun shells, if God follows GMT.

   But if today is the APOCALYPSE, that's another whole story.  That means the world (at least as we know it) is ending today (in which case, God is not on Greenwich time).  That means the graduating class at Lakeside High must be really bummed. On the other hand, that makes the Valedictorian's speech relatively easy to write.

   This makes me think about how much time we waste on unimportant things - even when we know the End is Near. If we really believed the end was near, would we really waste our time like we do?  Would I really be writing this blog?  Would you be reading it?  Why mow the lawn, or wash the car, or pay your taxes, or play Call of Duty: Black-Ops on-line?

   The other side of that coin is what we could accomplish if we really thought our days were numbered - if we lived, as the recent country music hit says, "like we were dying."  The novel I never wrote. The trip to Italy I never took.  The business I never quit my job to start.  The refugee camp I never volunteered to serve a year in.  The money I never gave away.  The broken relationships I never helped to heal.

   On the one hand, to waste our time and energy, as Mr. Camping did, combing the Scriptures for secret numerical codes that calculate the End of Days, seems ludicrous on its face.  Ironically, in all that intensive dissecting of the biblical text, Mr. Camping apparently missed the verse, surely in red print in his Bible, where Jesus said that nobody - not even he - knows the day or the hour, except God himself.

   On the other hand, living like the world was ending soon isn't such a bad idea.  If you really believed the end might come at any time, but you did not know the exact day or hour, wouldn't you be motivated to get done all those things you wanted to do but always put off?  And if you also believed that there would be a balancing of the scales of justice after that cataclysmic last day, wouldn't you want to make sure that the things you accomplished made a difference?

   So what are you doing reading this??