Wow – it’s
2012. It is the year of our Lord
two-thousand-and-twelve. When I was
growing up and even as a teenager, 2010 was science fiction; it never once occurred
to me I would actually see another
Century much less live in said Century!
According
to a lot of people, this is the year the world is going to change and the Apocalypse
is going to happen because the Mayan calendar said so. There are even people I know who jokingly
talk about this being the End of the World Year.
I have
two questions for these folks, and for anyone else: 1) Have you really considered what “the end of the world” means? 2) What if it doesn’t end?
If this
is the year the world, as we know it, ends, then shouldn’t people actually
start considering what happens after death and maybe start getting their lives
in order just in case there is a
hereafter and God? And, if this isn’t the year the world ends, shouldn’t
the future be viewed with more hope and a desire to make that hope into a
reality instead of destroying what is left of our planet and world?
Me,
personally, I don’t know if the world is going to end or not. The Mayans predicted a change for this year. A lot of people are taking this change as
being bad, but, What if it is good? It
is so easy to believe negative things than to actually look to the future with
hope. I know – I fight with this almost
every day and make a conscious choice to be hopeful and positive (and even then
I fail sometimes). I don’t put on rose
colored glasses where I refuse to see reality and “how things really are”
around me, but I hope for the best part of humanity playing out and I try, very
hard, not to just hope: I actually try
and put that hope into action somehow even if it is nothing more than praying
or knitting a scarf for a homeless man, or buying someone a cup of coffee who
looks cold.
The
positive aspect of human kind rests with each individual human, and that includes
me…and you. This year I want to make my
efforts be stronger so the human in me is not wiped out or taken over by cynicism;
instead, I want the human in me, the good in me, the God in me more visible
because I don’t think it always is.