This was my favorite wedding gift. It was a grey box with a silvery pillow top and pretty white lace. We were expecting a nice gift inside, but instead we opened it to find a seemingly bottomless pile of money not just sitting in the box, but actually springing out and overflowing the sides. Each note was a $2 bill (remember those?) and was folded into a bow-tie shape. Just to be sure, we dug through the bills making sure there was nothing else inside--moreso for the thrill of digging through a huge pile of money than the expectation of anything else. It was like an episode of DuckTales (remember that?) with Scrooge McDuck swimming through his vault full of coins. I have always been somewhat dissappointed whenever I've put my hand into a pile of coins because it never really feels like it looked when he dived and flipped like some ecstatic porpoise. But this pile of bills came about as close as anything.
Yesterday I finally finished unfolding all the bills and they now sit in a slightly crinkled pile of financially artistic beauty on our coffee table. One of these days we'll take them to the bank, but for now they are the most expensive piece of art I've ever owned. As I went through them (there were a hundred bow-ties), I came across one that was reversed. Instead of a picture of Thomas Jefferson smiling regally at me from the knot, there was the chests of three unidentified men signing the Declaration of Independence. It struck me odd that this one somehow passed through quality control and joined the other ninety nine. Then it struck me that maybe there was a reason. I imagined seeing my brother and his wife (the generous givers of the box of bow-ties) at christmas time and my brother telling me that if I could produce the bill that was folded backwards, there was another $100 for me. So I set that bill aside. It's now the bottom bill of that artistic crinkly pile I mentioned earlier.
The thing is, it's not going to happen. I noticed a long time ago that the general rule of thumb for my life was that if I imagined it happening, it probably wouldn't. Like some sort of anti-predict-the-future superpower. I have no idea what's going to happen later on, but I can come up with all sorts of things that won't. It seems to work for bad things as well as good things also. So far, I haven't been decapitated while riding my bike, or fallen onto a piece of rebar and impaling myself at a construction site, or been in a plane crash. Also, my teeth haven't crumbled and fallen out like so much sand.
The future is such a pointless place. I mean, when it becomes the present then its all well and good--unless it isn't--but until then, its just the future. A friend of mine has started studying Revelations and has been really frustrated to realize that all the things that she thought everyone knew about the end times is really just a second-class set of novels sold in Christian book stores and at Walmart. There's a really angry guy on TBN that thinks it's real too. I think he needs anger management classes.
An interesting thing to notice about Biblical prophecy is that even though a lot of it gets fulfilled during the history recorded in the Bible, nobody at the time of its fulfillment saw it coming or realized it was happening--if anything they realized something was up, then dismissed it because it didn't fit their interpretation. So what do we learn from this? That prophecy is for hind-sight, not fore-sight. It gives us hope that in the end things are going to work out for the best; that when it's all said and done the good guys win. It allows us to indentify who the good guys are because they fit the criteria. But nobody fits the criteria until they do. You can't see it coming. You can't say "oh, there's another big storm this year and China's about to take over the world, so that means Jesus is on they way." Because that's ridiculous and pointless. Jesus is going to sneak in here and tap us on the shoulder and say "sshhh, come with me, we'll surprise them all!" and then we'll both sneak around some dimensional corner and come out the other side and yell "Boo!" and then ...well, some other stuff will happen and how you feel about it will depend on how you feel about God and then everything will be the way it's supposed to be and not screwed up anymore. That's my take on Revelations anyway.
Until then though, I'm a little disappointed I'm not getting another $100 from my brother but quite thankful my house didn't burn down yesterday.
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