Jesus is returning, but there's work to be done

Most people wouldn't know what eschatology is if it blazed across the sky and swept them off their feet. But that doesn't keep them from talking about it.

A Newsweek cover in April blared, "Apocalypse Now. Tsunami. Earthquakes. Nuclear Meltdowns. Revolutions. Economies on the Brink. What the #@%!Is Next?"

The popular movie "2012" takes a spin around the ancient Mayan calendar which stops at 2012. Will the world end in 2012? Not according to a billboard in Nashville that predicts the end of the world on May 21 this year.

The end is near. But no one really knows how near "near" is. While some people look to tea leaves and ancient stone calendars to nail down a date, the answer is as close as the small print in your side-view mirror. It is "closer than it appears."

When talk turns to last things I often think of a man who, if my memory serves me, was Jeff. He was a physicist I met soon after I got saved in Woodbridge, Va., on July 16, 1979. (Now that's a date worth remembering!)

It's funny the things we remember about people. The little I recall about him after these 32 years helps me to keep a proper perspective on the Lord's coming.

Two flashbacks come to mind when I remember Jeff. In one, he deftly flipped a magazine with a scantily clad woman on the cover face down on the coffee table as he sat on the couch. In the other, I was riding with him as he drove the busy freeways around Washington D.C. Unexpectedly he thrust his head out of the window and gazed upward for what seemed an eternity toward the cloudless Northern Virginia skies.

It's true what they say about time right before an accident. It screeches to a creep. Thankfully Jeff, like a turtle, drew his head into the safety of the chassis before he prematurely sent us to heaven.

"We have to be watching", he said. "Jesus could come back at any moment."

Theologically speaking, Jeff was right on. His hermeneutics were terrible though -- downright dangerous.

These two snapshots of Jeff's life taken together lasted less than a minute, a blink of an eye, really. But taken together they say a lot about how we should live given the imminent return of Jesus.

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