Beating the Four Horsemen
According to the Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen will be the harbingers of the great end, where death and pestilence will reign, the faithful will cling weakly to anything onto which they can hold, and a final, epic battle between good and evil will ensue.
In the end times, an earthquake will shoot dust into the clouds and the stars will fall to earth. Man will seek shelter behind rocks and in caves. And the world, as we know it, will end forever.
That’s pretty dramatic.
Like, today, for example, I read about how a twenty-five-year-old man in Alabama was arrested for aggravated child abuse for repeatedly running a two-year-old boy in a clothes dryer. And sometimes the washer. And how another two-year-old boy in Virginia was killed after being sexually abused by his pregnant mother and her boyfriend.
Just today.
Nightmarish.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a suicide bomber in Syria, humiliating and potentially career-ending exposés of musical artists, and nearly daily verbal abuse by the Commander-in-Chief of United States Army.
Nothing really out of the ordinary.
It’s 2019. We barely flinch at the rally cry of, “Grab them by the pussy!” We watch cities burn, African American kids get shot, children dying at our border, and people wittingly partaking in reckless activities like eating laundry soap and driving blindfolded.
I miss a time where the biggest thing I had to worry about was getting kidnapped from a department store restroom. What a scary time.
Now, all I have to worry about is a person in a crowd with a bomb strapped to her waist, a former employee at the store I’m in opening fire on my family, someone stabbing me on the street, or maybe, just maybe, hopping aboard a hijacked plane.
Or nuclear war.
Lest I wax poetic for the ‘good old days’, I do miss a time where we had order. I miss a time when the line between right and wrong was much more clearly defined, a time when we realized that some of the actions we take, no matter how right we feel they are, may hurt other people.
The world has lost its way, and this country’s moral compass is more broken than ever. Our leadership, though I give credit to some for trying to maintain order in the White House, is, on the whole, quite a mess.
We’re meekly waiting for someone to fix something. Everyone’s hurling rocks. People are hurting people. And no one comes out of their corner to find solutions.
We’ve even taken to solving problems simply to spite others’ solutions.
Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to think it’s us. I’m beginning to think what we need to fix here is ourselves.
When we run roughshod over everything in the path of getting what we want, disregarding health, safety, happiness, and basic human decency, we get what we have.
It’s a civil war, but it’s quiet.
No one is happy, and no one is safe. And, while we continue to push our own agendas, execute our own personal vendettas, and make sure our own voices are heard above the din, we just create valleys into which people fall, devoured by that faceless beast seeking our demise.
When we lose our rules and mores, our standard of living decreases. When our standard of living decreases, we lose hope. When we lose our hope, doubt and division creep in.
And the devil, he loves division.
Maybe the apocalypse is more subtle, pitting families against each other, turning friends to enemies, and destroying leadership so people lose hope.
Maybe the apocalypse isn’t about fire and brimstone at all. Maybe there’s no cathartic, summer-blockbuster ending to this world. Maybe it’s less about natural disasters than personal ones.
Maybe the end hinges solely on us either flying off the deep end on our own personal crusades, or giving up hope entirely.
I’d love to imagine a world where all wealth was distributed equally, and families loved one another, and kids were safe to play wherever they wanted. Wouldn’t we all?
But we don’t have that, so we need to make the best of what we’ve got. We have to care for the poor and sick, hug our children, and find the strength to go on, but act right doing it.
Yelling and screaming only creates yelling and screaming. Hatred only begets more hatred. Fighting fire with fire will eventually burn us to death.
And I’d hate to die that way.
Maybe the apocalypse is right now, and we are being called to transcend — to step up — and make the best of, if not improve, our lives for ourselves and our children.
Because maybe the devil is closer than we think.
