For You Do Not Know What Hour

The alarm on my phone went off at 4am. “Good morning! It’s time to wake up. It is June 15th, and the time is 4am. Sunrise today will be at 5:52am. The weather today will be partly cloudy, with a high of 95 degrees.”

I really hate summers. The summer solstice is my most prized holy day. The summer solstice is when the days stop getting longer and start getting shorter again. Shorter days means later sunrise. Later sunrise means I get to sleep later. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

I turned off the alarm and just lay there in the dark for a while. Maybe I didn’t have to do this. Maybe I could just go back to sleep. What were the odds that this was the day? The odds were astronomical! But it could be. It could be the day and the others might sleep in too. There was no way of knowing. The only way of knowing for sure was to get up and do my duty, for myself, my country, and the world.

“Ok, Bixby. Read it to me again,” I said to my phone. It was a program I’d set up years ago. Maybe decades. I’d lost track.

“Ok,” my phone said. “Matthew 24, verses 3 through 35. Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

I listened as I got up and got dressed. I listened to the inerrant word of God, talking about the Anti-Christ, the Tribulation, and the false prophets. I followed along, saying the words in my head, having committed them to memory years ago. I listened to the signs, the events, and the foretelling of all the things that were now happening in the world. Not all of them, true, but enough. Wars and rumors of wars. Plagues. Famines. Pestilences and earthquakes.

I filled a paper bowl with breakfast cereal and milk, and got a disposable plastic spoon. I was all out of regular bowls and silverware and I knew that I needed to do dishes, but I never could find the time.

I took my breakfast outside and sat in the dark on my back patio. The sky was just starting to lighten off in the East. As I sat in the patio chair eating, the birds started waking up around me. I could hear the chirps and calls of several kinds of birds, and the buzzing of cicadas. A fly buzzed in front of my face and then flew away.

Life. Precious life. And it’s up to me to preserve it.

I finished my cereal and left the bowl on the glass patio table. I got up from the chair and went over to blanket I had spread out. I sat on the cushion and crossed my legs in front of me. Back straight, head up, and hands on my knees, I watched the far horizon.

My Lord is coming with the sunrise, I told myself. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. The sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

It will happen with the sunrise. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then the sun…

Over and over I repeated it in my mind. I focused my mind, and my will, and concentrated.

It will happen with the sunrise…

I had faith. I believed it. I knew it. It would happen. As soon as the sun came over the horizon, it would happen. The Son of Man would return to the Earth and usher in a thousand years of peace. Just a little longer now…

The sun peaked over the horizon and stabbed at my eyes. I pulled my gaze to the side and kept watching, kept the thoughts going. Soon the sun was all the way above the horizon.

It will happen just after sunrise. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. Then the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. The sign…

I made myself believe it. I focused my will on knowing this thing to be true. Just after sunrise the sun will be darkened and the stars will fall from heaven. I focused on it like my life depended on it. Because it did. And so did everyone else’s.

My shift was over an hour after sunrise, but I kept it up for two hours after that. And then I was done. Completely spent. I sagged back onto the blanket and just stared up at the patio awning. My mind wandered and I might have passed out.

I came back to myself a little while later. But I didn’t have the energy to get up just yet. It takes a lot out of me to keep that level of concentration.

A thought filtered through my exhaustion. One more day. I’ve delayed it one more day.

The part of Mathew just after the warning of the last days is this. “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. But as the days of Noah were, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be. For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and did not know until the flood came and took them all away, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

No one knows the day and hour. But I did. Or at least I told myself I did. In that moment, I believed it. I believed it fully. I knew it. I knew it as fact, and I always felt the gutwrenching fear as the time approached, knowing that the end of the world was coming.

It wasn’t the second coming of Christ that I was afraid of. Probably. But the capricious God of heaven had decreed there would be years of Tribulation beforehand. In Revelations it talked about a third of the people dying, and a third of all the animals, and a third of all the fish. The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, constant wars, and weird tormenting locust bugs with gold crowns and human faces that followed the Angel of the Abyss, Abaddon.

God would do all that to us if we didn’t stop him. The God of anger and vengeance would kill a third of all life on Earth, just so we would be grateful for his son coming.

So every day, in all parts of the world, people would watch the sunrise and make themselves believe. They would focus and concentrate on knowing when Christ was coming back. And if no one could know the day and the hour, then that could not be the day and the hour. As the sun rose in each part of the world, there were people to greet it with their belief that this was the day, and this was the hour.

And if Christ could never come back, the rest of it would have to be delayed as well. The beginning of the Tribulation, with the death and famine and funky locusts with man-faces, it all had to be pushed back, set aside for another time. It couldn’t happen now, because there were people watching for it.

Together, one hour at a time, the people of the Earth delayed the Apocalypse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Awaken, mortal, and resume your holy work!”

I forced myself to open my eyes. I had dozed off in the easy chair in the living room. The archangel Gabriel was standing over me, with blazing green eyes, fire for hair, and brilliant white wings. She looked pissed off.

“The Lord your God wants you back at work!” she thundered.

The words didn’t seem right for some reason. It was hard to focus and filter what she was saying. Some part of my brain realized it had been a couple of weeks since I had talked to anyone at all. I blinked a couple of times and tried to really hear what the angel was telling me.

“I-I… was asleep. What did you say?”

She lowered her voice to regular, human volumes. “I said, your boss called me and said you took a leave of absence and never came back. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I’m… uh, I’m fine.”

“Obviously,” the archangel said. For some reason she gestured to the room, but I wasn’t sure why. “I’m guessing you went off your meds. Why?”

“I don’t need them.”

She brushed the flame-red hair back from her face and adjusted the thin white chiffon scarf that was tied around her neck and draped over one shoulder. “You were switching, weren’t you? Damn it, why didn’t you tell me you were changing drugs? Where’s the new one?”

“I… what?”

Something about her voice filtered through my brain. I finally really focused on her face.

Shit. Not The Angel Gabriel. My sister, Gabrielle.

She said, “You’re supposed to cross-taper the drugs for your schizophrenia, not just stop using them. You know this! And you were doing so good up to now. Go get your new prescription. I’m assuming you at least picked it up.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know you don’t, not right now. But you’ll understand how important it is later. Now go.”

She looked at me expectantly. Just stared, looking me right in the eyes. I never have been able to say no to her when she does that. Finally, I got up and went to the bathroom medicine cabinet. Wordlessly I handed the Abilify injector over to her, and just as wordlessly she rolled up my sleeve and injected my deltoid.

Then she smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “I promise, if you don’t like it, we can try something else next month when it starts to wear off. I have to get back to work, but I’ll be back with some dinner in a few hours. Why don’t you take a shower and do some dishes in the meantime?”

“The drugs aren’t going to do anything,” I said a bit sulkily. “I’m fine.”

The next morning, I got up at 4am. I went outside, watched the sunrise, and did my duty to myself, my country, and my world. The Apocalypse was forestalled for another day. I, along with thousands of others in the world, saved the world from the coming Tribulation for one more day.

I did the same thing the next day.

The third day my alarm went off at 4am for some reason. “Good morning! It’s time to wake up. It is June 18th, and the time is 4am. Sunrise today will be at 5:52am. The weather today will be sunny, with a high of 92 degrees.”

I fumbled for my phone and turned it off.

Why the hell is my alarm going off this early? Was there something I was supposed to do at the butt-crack of dawn? It seems like there was, but… oh, right. Shit.

I could remember all the things I’d done and thought, I just couldn’t remember why they had seemed like a good idea. I couldn’t remember why I’d thought that I’d been waking up before dawn for years, rather than two or three weeks. None of it made sense. But that was normal.

I was about to go back to sleep when the smell hit me. It took a full minute to identify. It was part mildew smell coming from the kitchen, part unwashed sheets, and part unwashed me.

I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the light. My hair was sticking out all over the place and when I ran my fingers through it, it felt greasy. My usually smooth face had a full, unkempt beard. My eyes were sunken from not eating consistently.

I looked around the bathroom, and back into my bedroom. My house was a wreck. Trash everywhere. Nothing put away. Cupboards left open with the contents spilling out.

I went back to bed. I’d need my sleep. I was a mess, and my entire house was too. I’d need to get a shave and a haircut and a few good meals. I’d need to clean up the house, and I was pretty sure I’d have to replace almost everything in the refrigerator. The kitchen sink was full of unwashed dishes and old food. If last time was any indicator, my kitchen sink would be stopped up with molding food and I’d need a plumber to snake the drain.

Luckily my boss at the firm was understanding of my condition. I called him later that day and he gave me another week to get myself together and get stable. I’d need to get the house and myself cleaned up before I went back. Nobody wants a lawyer that looks like he’s been dragged through hell.