If we google “top news” today we will find stories of countries at war, extreme heat, children dying, arrests and targeted shootings, starvation, overdoses, wildfires and more. There is so much happening it might just feel like everything is about to come to an end.
Hasn’t it always been so, though?
Us humans basking in the beauty of creation and despairing in its danger? Reaching a point in each generation when we say “surely, this is it. Now we’ve done it, the end is nigh.”
Some say signs of the end times are an increase in natural disasters, moral decay, war and conflict, famine and disease. Don’t we see these things today? And, hasn’t every generation seen these things?
Perhaps it is ever thus – feelings of powerlessness and apathy set in because there is just too much happening out of our control. We begin to think there must be something better: A different world in a different place where we are at peace again, where there is no war, no famine, no pain.
And maybe that makes us give up on “this” world a little bit as we hope for that “other” world beyond. Let’s explore this on Sunday and see if the Book of Revelation might inform us of a new beginning right here, right now.