The World is Still Here

I woke up this morning with a headache. That means that at no time during December 21, 2012, did the world come to an end. Not when midnight first came to Kiribati or Tonga or New Zealand, and not when 11:59 pm faded away on Attu Island.

It also means that, in my half-asleep, pained condition this morning as I lay in bed, I sort of wished it had come to an end, because then I'd be in heaven without a headache. But a nice dose of Excedrin and trying to work the kinks out of my stiff neck - which is the source of almost all of my headaches - have left me in a much better disposition about still breathing the air of the earth that's still spinning around the sun.

Here's what I don't understand about the true believers (and even the half-believers) in the Mayan Apocalypse: they hoarded bottled water and toilet paper and other survivalist supplies. I heard about it from people who heard about it on the news or from people who knew people who were doing the hoarding.

Why would you hoard??? The. World. Is. Ending.

That's what they thought, anyway. And when the world ends, it ceases to exist, so there's no need to drink water or use toilet paper or hide out in a protected part of your house, shooting at looters who have come to take your stash.

I had a dream one time, when I had been married about a year, back in the late 1970's, and in my dream I heard on the radio or the TV news broadcast that the world was in the process of ending. So I went to the front door of my house, opened it, and stood in the doorway and watched. Off in the distance of my neighborhood, a fog denser and higher than any I'd seen was very slowly moving toward me. As it engulfed each house, each yard, each fence, I knew that those things were gone - swallowed up and erased from existence.

There was no panic, no neighbors screaming and running for their lives. It was a peaceful end in a silent fog that eventually moved to my doorstep, and I felt a sense of awe that just inside the fog an arm's reach from where I stood was nothing, because everything had disappeared. And now it was my turn, and then I woke up, not frightened at all.

I'm sure that when the world does end, it won't be like that. It won't be some slowly moving fog that saves me for last. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure it will be like that. When God sends the new heaven and the new earth, it will be filled with peace - the peace that passes understanding.

Until then, my head is feeling better, and I have some decisions to make about what to do for Christmas dinner. I'll probably head back to Costco to pick up a ham, and I'm hoping it won't be as busy as it would have been without the Mayan thing, because after all, there are quite a few people out there who won't be needing to buy toilet paper for a long time.