Hi Mattnoel,
I feel odd jumping in here, since I usually don't post. But you're not the only one that gets jitters. Your question is coming up in a lot of minds. Like these other posters, I really don't think this current situation relates directly to Armageddon, but anxiety is still high these days--and I UNDERSTAND the panic that grabs you when you never expected it. I recently read something from CS Lewis, a wonderful English professor/author/apologist (who wrote classics like "Mere Christianity" and "The Screwtape Letters"), which helped me immensely.
Back in the 1948, people asked CS Lewis how he thought they were to live in view of the nuclear age they'd just entered--and I think it would be comparable to our staring at the terrorist age we've entered--and he replied:
"Why, as you would have livedin the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Sandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents. In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. ...It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of a painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty...." Several years later he wrote, "One meets young people who make the threat of (nuclear war) a reason for poisoning every pleasure and evading every duty in the present...If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things--praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts--not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (any microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
To decide to act in LOVE today, deliberately, is an act of faith and an act to diminish fear. And you can do this. This is what Christ meant when he asked who would be found faithful.
My best suggestion to you is to pray earnestly for peace, kinda like Jacob wrestling with the angel. If you want peace bad enough, you will keep asking for it, and God WILL give it to you. I used to wonder, hey does God just like us to grovel?? But I see it very differently now. I think God WANTS to give us things like peace and joy and patience, but nobody really asks Him seriously for it. They pray a little bit, like rote, but they still don't yearn for it inside. If you REALLY want something that's good--like peace--God promises to give it. But pour yourself into your request!
bebu
