Some light reading for those who missed the Rapture
If you’re reading this on Sunday morning as scheduled, then either the End of the Universe didn’t happen, or a few of us are stuck in an alternate reality somewhere. You might even say we’ve been well, Left Behind.
If you’re reading it later in the morning, I’m probably in church. Unless of course it really did happen, and the Ledger-Enquirer circulation folks had the foresight to map out some afterworld deliveries. There must be an eternity (so to speak) of jokes about newspapers and Hell; I can think of a few choice ones myself.
How they figured which carriers would deliver to which afterlife must have been an interesting discussion, but that’s not my department. In any case, if you are indeed reading this bit of fluff in one of the eternal realms -- well then, boy is there ever egg on MY face.
Speaking of church, (which I was, about two paragraphs ago), it occurs to me now that our flock might have violated some serious standards of doctrinal correctness by scheduling services as usual for the day after the world was supposed to end. Maybe we should have covered the permanent sign in front of the sanctuary with a temporary one that said something like:
Sunday Services 10 a.m.
(Apocalypse Permitting)
At least that way we’d have let the Lord know we really do accept the whole Revelations thing, even if we were a mite skeptical that some California radio preacher was the world’s patch-in to the Holy Hotline.
Maybe we should have taken it more seriously. After all, it’s been 17 years since the dude’s last End Times vision. Surely he’s earned some benefit of the doubt points by now.
As for me, I guess I was probably like a few million other American men this weekend. You’d think the prospect of our imminent Ascension (and if that doesn’t define blind optimism, nothing ever will) would at least get us out of mundane concerns like yard work.
Yeah, right.
We were out there mowing in the hot Southern sun as if it were just like any other day and something as insignificant as lawn care still mattered. (OK, “lawn” is a stretch in my case. But if the patches of grass, weeds, vines, ivy, dandelion, wild onion, sweetgum sprouts and other Chattahoochee Valley flora are cut to roughly the same length, you get a sort of mottled greenish surface that in very bad light somebody with very bad eyesight might think is a yard. I was pretty sure that if Jesus came, He wouldn’t be fooled.) In any case, after a couple of hours of pushing that heavy old mower around I’m less worried about Rapture than rupture.
If you really paid attention last week, you sensed that even people who weren’t talking about it seemed resigned to fate. The Braves sleepwalked and stumbled their way through a couple of games in Arizona as if they knew this was their last stopover on the way to Judgment Day. Matters far weightier and more transcendent than baseball were obviously on their minds. Who cares about four runners thrown out at third when the Head Umpire is about to call the season on account of Armageddon?
Thursday night, TNT got into the spirit of things -- well, sort of -- by showing “Signs.” That’s the one with Mel Gibson’s family putting on pointy foil hats and fighting off an invasion of aliens. (The ugly monsters-from-space kind, not the ones politicians try to scare us with.) Talk about sadistic: Just in case the Rapture folks hadn’t freaked us out quite enough yet, TNT gave us Mel Gibson. Now that’s scary.
If indeed we’re still here this Sunday morning, there are no doubt people -- total wack jobs, but still people -- who are actually disappointed. The radio preacher, like Ricky Ricardo, might have some ’splainin’ to do before anybody but his most loyal and devoted wackos buys his next End Times calendar.
Well, they needn’t be discouraged. According to the Science Channel, the dying sun is going to crisp us all sometime between 3 billion and 5 billion years from now, assuming we don’t do the job ourselves a few billion years sooner. Either way, I don’t think the foil hats will cut it.
This story was originally published May 22, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Some light reading for those who missed the Rapture."