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End times stuff is, for a lot of us, in our bones. The church I grew up in didn’t emphasize Revelation, but I can remember many many late nights in the car as a kid with the Armstrongs on the radio - “The World Tomorrow”... If you are of a certain age you probably do too.

Being taught to hide under the desk at school (they told us our town would be at the top of the list for a nuclear strike and our school desks evidently had super-atomic-bomb-deflecting properties)...

I think a lot of people believed that the end of the millennium would be the end of the age and assumed that nuclear war with the Soviets would be the catalyst. When the Soviet Union fell it left a lot of people of a certain age wondering, I have to say. Whether you consciously believed in “end times” or not, it was well embedded in most peoples’ psyches that a catastrophic war with the Soviets was destined to happen.

Hal Lindsey’s books in the 70s captured a lot of this. I never read them, but I could have written them myself, this is the stuff that was in the air my whole life.

I think this unspoken sense of doom is what led to the over-hyped panic about the supposed year 2000 software bugs that were supposed to destroy the world. And the manufactured panic about the mayan calendar; people who don’t believe in the bible worrying about what the mayans said or didn’t say. I’m happy to say I never missed a moment of sleep over either of these.

Still, it is in my make-up to watch as history takes its shape. I have my own ideas about how Revelation unfolds in real time but I’ll only talk about it over late night coffee, so it would cost you. Mostly I’m happy to watch and listen and let the events play out, and just be ready. Is the next pope the last one? For a kid who grew up listening to late night radio driving down Oklahoma highways, it would not surprise me a bit. I’ve been expecting Christ’s return a long time. I just don’t know if I’ll be alive in my body to see it, or alive in my spirit.