The End of the World

Obviously since I'm writing this post and you are reading it, the Mayan calendar didn't mean what a ton of people thought it meant ... that the world would end today, the 21st day of December 2012. I read yesterday that a lot of people had done some pretty crazy things financially because they truly believed the Mayan calendar predicted that life as we know it would end today. Planetary alignments, solar flares, melting of the earth's core ... and I'm sure the list of the things people believed would happen today goes on and on. And I've got a confession to make ... there was a time in my life when i would have completely bought into all of the hoopla ... a time when I would have believed the wacky interpretations of the old Mayan calendar to be dead on right. Heck, I probably would have even considered moving into an abandoned nuclear silo ... yeah, yeah, I know ... ranks right up there with my irrational behavior when I discovered the cracks in my basement floor. Though I didn't believe the world would really end today, I must admit that I decided this morning that I would postpone cleaning my house until tomorrow. Seriously, why spend possibly my last day on earth scrubbing toilets when I could curl up on the couch with my hounds and watch mindless television? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I was thinking earlier today that I don't remember ever pondering when I was young the possibility that the world would come to an end, and I'd be willing to bet that's true for a lot of people in my generation. Oh, I heard my fair share of sermons in church about "the end of time," but there's something about youth that disregards those types of warnings. When I was young, I thought I would live forever, which probably explains a lot of my risky and careless behavior during my teenage and college years. It's funny how much my thinking and my actions changed when I became a mom ... I thought a lot more about the future of the world I lived in, and more specifically, the world my children would encounter as they grew up. Suddenly, not only did I remember those old "end of time" sermons from when I was a kid, I was scared to death of what the preachers had said would happen one day ... fear of the unknown is a powerful thing, friends, a powerful thing indeed.

The truth is that although the interpretation of the ancient Mayan calendar stating that the world would end today was incorrect, there will come a day for each one of us when our individual worlds ... the worlds that are our lives ... will most definitely come to an end. Though when I was young I thought I would live forever, every passing year now reminds me that I'm much closer to the end of my life than the beginning. Perhaps because I live alone, I often wonder when I go to bed at night if I will wake the next morning ... I often wonder if the world that is me will end while I sleep. But here's the thing ... whether it's the end of the whole world or the end of my own life, only God knows the day or the hour those events will occur ... not the Mayans, not the preachers, not the scientists, not the doctors ... only God knows the day or the hour. And the real truth, the really deep truth, is that each one of us should live every single day as if it could be our last, because ... well ... because it could.

"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Matthew 24:36