Have you ever read Revelation, the last book of the Bible?  It's a wild book.  After walking through a forest preserve the other day, I decided to read it, again.  As always, I wondered about its precise meaning.  How will John's vision of the end of the world really be expressed in the span of human history and time?  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?

     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.

    Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that the world will one day end, as will all of us.  And I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.

     So what do we really know?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, if God, in some way, is working through the world, this end means more than itself.  Each moment rests in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.