“In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.” Jude 1:18
Earlier
“ I’ve been seeing that sign a lot lately,” Jeff said to no one but himself as he crossed Peachtree Street on his way to Georgia State University for his Advanced Astronomy class. Part of the women’s lib thing, he guessed. What a bunch of nuts!
The large placard read, God is Coming and She’s Mad as Hell!
There is no God, Jeff knew that; and if there was it sure wouldn’t be a woman. If God was a woman, nothing would ever get done, because She would be out buying shoes!
Except for a brief time during childhood, Jeff had never believed in God, though he didn’t really not believe in god either. He didn’t know if God should be a big G or a little g and didn’t really care. He was way too busy to worry about trivial things. The market was crashing, for God’s sake, again.
Jeff had several business interests, owned a couple of restaurants and a couple of SCUBA dive shops in the Caribbean, but when it came to astronomy, that was his hobby and obsession. He remembered his Mom telling him, “You have a one-track mind Jeffrey Ross!” And he did.
His graduate courses would help him achieve one of his life- long goals, to make a spectacular stellar discovery, maybediscover a comet or asteroid, though a comet would be a lot cooler.
Jeff wondered how Halley must have felt when a comet was named after him. Hmmm, he mused to himself, maybe the Jeffrey Comette? No, too French. Since 9/11, Jeff had avoided anything French, even fries and dressing, though neither had anything to do with the French. The Jeffrey Ross Comet would work.
Running up the stairs, almost late for class, he couldn’t wait to find out if anyone else knew about the light in the sky hde ha seen last night. That’s when he was in Villa Rica, a few miles west of Atlanta, at the Georgia State University Observatory. He’d already decided not to say anything about it, it had been so brief. A bright light in the sky; and then it just disappeared, gone in seconds. The multi-magnitude light, brighter than the flash of those old, blue flash cubes on a Brownie camera, a light that almost sucked him into its folds, actually cast his shadow on the grass below. Then it was gone, just like that.
Jeff had taken a couple of digital photographs during the 12 seconds or so he observed the light, a pin-point prick of extreme-whiteness. He could almost feel the light, the beam of photons traveling through distant space at eleven million miles a minute, hitting his skin with an invisible and usually indiscernible force. He could feel the heat evaporating the moisture on his arm. And then the cool chill, as the blip of light disappeared as suddenly as it was born. Was he actually feeling the light hit his arm? Not possible.
“I think I’ve just had a Kodak Moment,” he said out loud, loud enough for the cicadas and other nocturnal animals in the immediate area to hear. There were no other people around.
In 11 years of studying the heavens, Jeff had never seen or heard of such a phenomenon. It could have been a supernova, he thought, but the characteristics weren’t right. A supernova, the result of an exploding star, usually lasts for several days or weeks. Some astronomers held the belief that the “Star in the East” in the Jesus story had been a supernova; but then, that story was a myth.
Walking down the hall, on the way to room 111A, the astronomy lab, Jeff took a quick detour and turned left into the men’s room. Avoiding the urinals, those wall-toilets he refused to use, they do splatter all over the place sometimes, he walked into the handicapped stall, inhaling the anesthetic aroma of Texsize, the smell provoking memories of his own home as a boy after Pearl, the cleaning lady, left. He liked the added space offered by the handicap stall, not so claustrophobic. Plus, you can’t just go to the bathroom out in the open, in front of God and everybody, he thought. Bathroom stuff was private!
As he turned to exit the stall, he saw it, a sign taped to the stall door. “THE END IS NEAR… for real Jeffrey!” At the bottom of the sign it said to check out the website, shesmadashell.com.
Melissa Ross lived in a gorgeous cluster-home in Sandy Springs, a North Atlanta suburb not far from Dunwoody where she regularly shopped, with patterned concrete drive, botanical garden-like landscaping in the small but impressionable front yard and gated entrance.
She had been married to Jeff for almost twenty-five years, most of which were good years, but not all. They had been great friends at one time and travelled throughout the Caribbean, where they dove the coral reefs and walked in the sandy-white surf, hand in hand. They were both beach people and had taken few trips to the mountains. Some people like mountains, some people like beaches; but hardly ever is one a mountain person and a beach person. She knew that was true.
“Mommy, is Jesus happy?” When Jeff and Melissa adopted Audry, they didn’t have a clue how precocious she would be, learning to read by age five. At six years Audry had memorized the multiplication tables, up to 20 X 20.
“What do you mean honey?” answering Audry’s question with a question.
“You know Mommy, is Jesus happy?”
“Of course he’s happy, honey. Why would you ask?” Melissa never ceased to be surprised by some of the questions posed by her seven year old.
“Well, I was watching TV, and they were talking about this man on there, you know, named Elton John, who said Jesus was gay. So I got Daddy’s old college dictionary and looked it up; and that man was right, except I thought everybody already knew Jesus was happy.”
Trying not to laugh out loud, Melissa opened the dictionary to see when it was printed, 1960.
“Well I guess you’re right Audry. Gay does mean happy.” At least it used to she thought. But that was then, and this is now; and Elton was not alluding to Jesus’ happiness, she was sure.
Can’t wait to tell Jeffrey about this one, and Melissa couldn’t help but laugh.
After the bathroom stop, Jeff headed to lab, booted up his computer and immediately searched for shesmadashell.com, and there it was.
Jeff wondered which “Jeffrey” the sign on the toilet stall door referred to. Surely it couldn’t have been me he thought. Could it?
Visiting the web site, he learned about a new religious movement with a Mother God, rather than God the Father. She was, before Him. Already convinced this was just another lunatic web page, he exited out.
Jeff thought it unusual, all the talk recently about the end of the world. The date, December 21, 2012, kept coming up. Seemed too precise. But there were also similar predictions from Merlin and Nostradamus; and the weather really was strange, to say the least.
Nostradamus gets a lot of press, he thought, along with the Mayans and the Hopi Indians. It seemed like every time he turned on the National Geographic Channel, Discovery or The History Channel, the world was soon ending. There seemed to be disaster and apocalypse and terror and crime and pedophilia and rapes and a lot of un-Godly stuff going on.
Jeff was a news-junkie, always had been, and was well aware of most of the tragedy that stalked the world. And then of course there was Mom. She seemed to always talk about the Bible and the end of the world. Used to scare the beejezus out of him. She would agonize about the earthquakes to come, the hailstorms, the plagues and famines, and God’s wrath that would surely follow. Only he did not believe in mythology, and that included God, or god. He wondered momentarily if all Mom’s preaching, and scaring, made him the doubter that he was.
Though a non-believer, Jeff had always been inquisitive and had read the Bible, or at least some parts, and had even read a little in the Koran and Book of Mormon. He knew that the Bible was, and is, the bestselling book in the history of mankind, but also the least read. It had sold many more copies than even the Harry Potter Series. For a brief moment, Jeff wondered if he should open a Bible store; but the thought was quickly dismissed.
“You better mind your manners Jeffrey, or God will get your butt!” his Mom reminded him on a regular basis when he was little, usually right after threatening him with reform school if he didn’t clean up his room. He did worry about that for years, even lost sleep about it; but his butt remained the same. Skinny. And he doubted God, or god, more every day. Sometimes he thought God was as mean as his Dad.
Mom harped on the parts she liked and ignored the others, at least that’s the way it seemed to him. She never seemed to notice that it was written by men, for men, not women.
The Bible said that God created the world, and in the end, whenever that was, he was going to get so ticked-off at everybody that he would destroy the world, at least as it’s now known. Sounds pretty brutal for a “Loving God,” he thought, a god who apparently intended to turn everyone into crispy- critters.
“What a bunch of hogwash!” he said out loud. He knew we would still be around, doing the things that man does, millions of years from now.
Glancing out the window of the lab, Jeff saw the dark-gray storm clouds gathering to the west and wondered if this was going to be another hailstorm like the one last week. He had heard about softball sized hail but had never had the experience, thankfully. Then the hail started, just an occasional clunk-pop from two stories below the lab, as the stones of ice left their impression on the cars parked by the street.
As the intensity of the hailstorm increased, the dark cumulus clouds swirling high above, like a heavenly concoction of dark- gray cotton candy, were soon joined by sixty mile-an-hour winds and lightening the likes of which he had never seen.
With a loud clatter, the windows began to shred in spite of the safety-glass design; and everyone ran for the door in a mad exit, except the foreign student who had been sitting next to the western most window. A grapefruit sized hailstone fractured her skull. Not knowing that the young girl with the blue headscarf was already dead, Jeff turned back and ran to her rescue.
Grabbing the student by the legs of her blue jean laden body, Jeff pulled her from beneath the window, then lifted her fireman-style, already knowing that her limpness was not a good indicator of survival.
A’isha Hamdin Billingsworth had seen her last hailstorm, had been carried by her last handsome rescuer and would never visit her mosque again.
Classes were cancelled. The hail continued.