PART 5: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

HOW IT ENDS

While regaling you with horrific tales of strange weather patterns, military coups, a likable and sinister world leader, and any other number of signs-of-the-times, I could lay out an apocolyptic grand finale that even the Great Volumes of Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins couldn't dream up (I could also, like Tim-n-Jerry, make a version for kids!). I will spare you the comets, meteorites, bar code tatoos, raising of armies, selecting of Anti-Christs and all of that. It is all very confusing and fear-infusing anyway, and I think that sometimes we blame "the end times" instead of taking responsibility and trying to make things better now (like the environment, and world peace, which I think are good things).

Any conjecture as to how all this living here on earth will finish, is mostly guesswork as far as I can tell. I've read Revelation and can't seem to make too much of it. But maybe I watch too much TV too, so, who knows.

I'm going to use my Brief History of Humanity and the Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold narrative to try and sum up my own eschatology. So this is not a pure statement of facts-- like the stuff I wrote before undoubtedly was-- it is a lot of guess work, like Ms. Cleo without the fake accent and jail time.

So here we are; clumsily destructive mud-people with hearts of gold who have learned how to be both extremely loving and extremely suicidal and bent on turning ourselves and each other into plain-old-mud. We've become so apt at using our fleshy mud-lump brains that we have hundreds of creative tools for turning any and every living thing into mud, and could do so with the push of a button (granted, we've been a lot more responsible with the button pushing procedures... there are codes, there are codes). Some of us have swayed more to trying to love and laugh in the way that God told us when he had the heart-to-heart with us. Others of us have become argumentative and destructive mostly. We used Choice as our means to become either way.

Ed. Note: I have conveniently cut out any further explanation of who is in and who is out, and who might-be-in and who might-be-out, and the grey areas and complications that we chose to bring down upon ourselves way back when, while we were dumb and ignorant and fresh from the mud, coughing up the Breath of the Cosmos. Sorry, if you want to know what I really think about all of that and salvation and everything I'll try to sum it up by drawing you a diagram of an invisible castle. Exactly.

Ever since our heart-to-heart with God-as-human, Jesus; God's been working on trying to fix everything from his end of the deal, without messing up the whole "Choice" thing for us and our tiny mud-brains. If he actually just fixed it right away, and made everything okay again, I think our tiny, three pound mud brains would explode... but that's only a scientific explanation and conjecture. Instead, God has let us sit with his heart-to-heart for a while, and think about what we've done... and will do instead.

And then one day... Rescue. I wonder if it will be cataclysmic or beautiful. I wonder if it will unfold like a sunrise, explode like a firecracker, or happen as simply as closing our eyes one second, and opening them in eternity... whatever that means. If there are literal "streets of gold" and "mansions," I don't think we will notice them. We will be free of our ill-infected 3-pound mud-brains and will be able to operate on something that can see God, hear our story clearly, hear the Truth about everything, and experience something beyond the shadows we've known, without anything exploding or turning back into plain-old-mud again. Then we'll all have a good cry before getting about the real business of loving and laughing and living. Those shadow versions of life, laughter, and love that we knew when we were the Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold, will be real, solid things now. We won't have to come up with witty things to call ourselves like Matt, or Chet, or Jane, or American, or black, or white, or humans, or Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold. God will tell us our real names in the language of Deep Heaven. A language without the limitations of words, and a language which spoke out of nothingness and made humans out of mud and mud out of nothing. We will know the real word for "love" and we will laugh at how wrong we were. We will laugh at our questions and conundrums. We will laugh, and laugh, and sigh and "love".

And then, at the climax of How It Ends, after we've been given our right names, God will tell us his real name... not Yahweh, Jah, God, or any of those mud-people guesses. He will say a wordless word that will mean "I AM" somehow. I think he will say his name is "Ian." We were so stinking close down here!

And we will laugh and laugh and love and live.