[Dominick]

I tend to discount these type of stories. If we are doing what we should do, then what good does this do. If God wills it, I am not one to argue. This isn't prophecy, it is hand wringing.

A Priest told me live like you are going to die in five minutes. Live like a truck is barreling down the road and will hit you in the next fifteen minutes. This Priest died on his feet in his rectory kitchen and was dead before he hit the ground from a massive heart attack. Boom, like that.

You are just as dead as if the plague hits you in the middle of a hurricane and a big meteor strikes North America, turning it into the next moon of Earth. That would be just as much the will of God, as a Toyota driven by a old man running you down in front of 7-11.

[Knitting A Conundrum]

I agree with the philosophy of what that priest told you, Dominick, but I think thing after thing after thing has been piling up, coupled with the outrageous level of immorality and abortion and scandal, the large number of churches that once were clearly able to agree with the apostles' creed becoming unmistakably apostate, the problems within the Catholic Church herself, made worse by over a generation of bad catechesis, the large number of apostate and moving to apostate clergy and religious within the church, that it is just natural to contemplate these things.

For the faithful, it really doesn't matter in the day to day workings of the world whether we are entering a chastisement or even the end times. Our job is to keep on keeping on.

Yet Jesus himself said "When you see these signs, lift up your head, for your time of redemption is at hand." (It's in one of the end time discourses, I'd have to look it up to find the exact passage, and the wording is from my memory.)

What that says to me is: See, the hand of God is still on the world. And this is heartening. And perhaps, it should give us a push to take our Christian duties to be light and salt, a city set on a hill more seriously.

I, as a Christian, need to be clearly doing the Lord's work, so that when he returns or calls me home, I can say honestly, I was just doing what a servant of God should have been doing.