Remember the man carrying the double billboard, claiming THE END IS NEAR?
People wondered what his message was.
Was he warning us we’d better start behaving, or else?
Did the man himself believe it meant the end of the World?
Or was he being paid to carry the billboard for some secret reason, perhaps even to encourage shoppers to spend their money now, why save when “the end” was near?
Did anyone really believe he knew something the rest of us didn’t?
Whenever someone stopped to talk to him he’d ignore them.
Or so at least I was told, since I never actually saw such a man walking around carrying such a contraption.
Regardless of whether he was a truth sayer, or a mischief-maker, he was right. The end was near. It always is, because none of us know when our “end” might arrive.
I’m sure that most Americans know about the tragic fire in Stamford on Christmas morning when five people, three young sisters, and their grandparents, died in an early morning fire, the result of embers being removed from the fireplace to make it safe for Santa to descend. The embers were put somewhere safe, or so the mother believed when she fulfilled her childrens’ wishes to prepare the chimney for Santa.
She and a male friend (the divorced father of the girls was elsewhere) survived the fire, and neighbors overheard the mother saying, “My whole life is in there.” Not only her children, but her own parents as well died in that fire.
The “end” comes like “a thief in the night,” and no one knows when it’s coming, just that it is.
There isn’t anybody currently on this planet going to be around 100 or so years from now, not one of us, nobody, all 3 billion of us.
Pouf! Gone!
Forever?
We’ll be finding out soon enough. Or maybe not.
If I were God, would I have left everyone in the dark like this?
Would you?
It’s a guessing game, just like the billboard man said it was.
And I, personally, am in no hurry to learn the answer.
Happy New Year.
