Before you start reading this, look out the window. Are the dead walking the streets? Is the sky on fire? Is the Lord tearing around on a fiery chariot?
Here’s the most important one: Do you see chickens the size of horses running around overturning cars and pecking the heads off people?
No? OK, we’re good to go.
For the record, I made up that chicken thing. If nothing else, it at least puts me on par with all those who ever thought they knew when the world would end — and it didn’t.
Doomsayer Chad Daybell said/prophesied that the world would end last Wednesday. Unless I’m still in my death throes involving a lot of hallucinogens, it didn’t. Near as I can tell, I’m still here and so are you.
Being Mormon, I’ve heard these end time predictions my entire life. Prophets, apostles, seminary teachers, the Old Man, missionary companions — they all have said things about the end of the world, and so far none of them got it right.
Seems the Lord is always coming back this month, next month, this year, next year, before the next election, after the next election, when the moon turns to blood, or when the Minnesota Vikings win a Super Bowl.
I was prophesied to by at least a couple of missionary companions who insisted we were so deep into the last days that we probably wouldn’t even be released from our missions before the sky parted.
The Old Man’s patriarchal blessing says he will live to see the Second Coming of Christ in the flesh. If that’s true, the Lord better hurry.
How often do these “end of the world” feebs have to get it wrong before others like them start realizing that they’re either overly obsessed or mentally ill?
I understand the motivation. It’s a puzzle that becomes an obsession, something that is impossible to let go, given the imagined rewards in getting it right. What would be cooler than solving a mystery that has eluded the entire Christian world for more than 2,000 years?
The problem is that even in the infinitesimal possibility that you get it right, people won’t care because they’ll be dead — and so will you.
So why waste so much time and energy on it, especially since you have a better chance of finding pirate treasure by randomly digging holes in the Utah desert?
But just for fun, I’ll take a turn at predicting the end of the world. This much is certain: It will come for each of us.
For some of us, the end will come tonight or tomorrow. While minding your own business, your world will cease with a stopped heart, a brain embolism, a poor driving decision or a stray bullet.
If not soon, then eventually. After all, no one gets out of here alive. In that respect, we all have our own second coming.
Robert Kirby is The Salt Lake Tribune’s humor columnist. Follow Kirby on Facebook.
