Are we at the end?  Do these waves of hurricanes and earthquakes indicate the earth's death is imminent?  Many think so.  On the other hand, history is strewn with instances of people claiming that they, and they only, know when the world will end.  And unless all of us are living in a dream, they all were wrong.
     The larger question is this:  why do humans tend to embrace the thought that the world might be ending?  Why do so many of us long for the return of, variously speaking, the Creator, Jesus, or God?  Why do millions of people across the planet wish for the type of relief that they perceive the world's end will provide?


     We can think of many answers and possibilities.  Undergirding all of them, however, is a deep seated longing for something better than what we have now. As if the world as it is will not satisfy, as if the way history has been to this point is a dead end.

     I fear that this demeans what God has made.  Sure, the world is less than perfect, and disasters of course happen every day, disasters of nature, disasters and terrors perpetrated by human hatred and folly (I think of, for one, the horrific ethnic cleansing currently being carried out in Myanmar), and more.  We all know this.  But God gave us the world to cultivate and steward, to do the best with it we can.
     Though we long for relief, and are not inherently wrong to do so, if we focus only on the next life, we miss doing what we could and ought to do for the many people who are suffering, often terribly, in this life.  We ignore what is before us.  Looking to the end, and only to the end, is self-centered and myopic.
     After all, Jesus didn't dismiss the world; he embraced it.