Gentle Rains

Tropical Storm Tammy is blessing our region with some wonderful and much-needed rain today. Bubba woke me up again this morning, this time about quarter til four, and I heard the rain on the roof and realized I'd left the garden shed (also my writing shed) standing wide open. I went out and shut the doors during a lovely break in the early sporadic showers that were just starting to move into the area.

It reminds me that early and late rains feature heavily in the prophecies surrounding the outpouring of God's spirit before and during the terrible Chastisements that fall upon the land during the Last Days. I got a bellyfull of bad eschatology (Last Days theology) during my years as an evangelical, and I have to admit that I haven't even attempted to second-guess the Church as regards the end of time as we know it, beyond knowing that the Church has major doctines on the Four Last Things, which are Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

I think we need to be reading the signs and realizing that God is standing at the threshold of administering a great Judgment. Natural and man-made disasters are besetting us at an alarming rate, and like the sign of the woman taken by birth pangs, these incidents are increasing in frequency and intensity. Our nation is taken up in the Culture of Death, we are being fed immorality and being desensitized to sin and carnality that decent people of even a generation ago could recognize and be duly shocked by. We're seeing the day prophesied by Isaiah, in which black has become white and white, black, in the popular lexicon.

Our Lord gave us the signs and warnings of the end of the age so that we could be duly alert and diligent when the time came. Of course, it's true that any one of us could be facing Him in our own final judgment before the sun rises again tomorrow, finding unexpected Death in any number of ways. But more than likely, the vast majority of us will live for more than just tonight, and we owe it to ourselves, to God, and to our fellow men who are floundering in sin and darkness, to be about our business of rescuing souls from ultimate perishing.