A CLOUD THE SIZE OF A MAN’S HAND

By the fifth grade I knew that the end of the world was coming and that it could happen at any time.  The pastor of our Seventh-day Adventist church, my Sabbath school teachers, and the teachers of the Adventist school that I had attended since first grade all had done their best to explain how we were in the End Times before Christ’s Second Coming.  They explained that there were myriad signs that we were hurtling toward the end.  The world was in chaos, there were “wars and rumors of war,” and there were more and worse earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters than ever before that presaged the end.

We had learned that the prophetess, Ellen G. White, had had visions during which she was transported to heaven to speak directly with God (or at least with Christ), who had described to her the events leading up to and occurring at the Second Coming.  She had written down these visions, prophesying that Christ would come from heaven through the nebula in the constellation Orion.  Apparently, heaven was somewhere on the other side of that nebula.  Christ’s arrival would appear first as a cloud the size of a man’s hand, a cloud that would grow to reveal Christ and his heavenly host.  

I had learned that at the Second Coming everyone would experience one of two very different fates and that there was no in-between.  Either we would be among the righteous and would be swept up to be with Christ and to spend eternity in perfect bliss, or we would be among the wicked and would be struck dead.  Even worse, a thousand years later, God would resurrect the wicked not to give them a second chance but so that they could be drafted into Satan’s army in a final battle against God called Armageddon.  It would be no contest.  God would destroy Satan and all the wicked for all time, in a second, eternal death by fire.  I learned too that we could only be saved if our record was spotless, if all of our sins were forgiven at the time of the Second Coming.  Frankly, at least in my case, those odds did not look good.

By this point I had learned the Lord’s Prayer which I recited most nights before going to sleep, in part to please my mom.  That prayer included the plea, “forgive us our debts.“  Was that enough?  I thought that “debts” referred to sins, but I wasn’t sure.  Besides I found myself sinning all the time—in between my nightly prayers—teasing my sisters, disobeying my parents, failing to do my chores, watching TV on the Sabbath, not paying attention in school.  The list was endless.  What if the Second Coming occurred when I had sins on my record?  Would I have time to send up an emergency prayer?  It didn’t seem likely.  

When I was in elementary school, my favorite class by far was recess.  My athletic skills were somewhere below the 50th percentile, but I was fleet-footed and enjoyed group sports.  So I looked forward to the pickup soccer games that we often played at recess when I was in the fifth grade.  It was during one of those games that I noticed a small cloud in the northern sky that seemed to be growing in size.  When I mentioned this to a couple of my classmates, one of them asked if I thought it was going to rain.  The other, David, gave me a look and said, “No, Johnny’s thinking of something else.”  Without saying anything directly, David made it clear that he had the same concerns that I had.

I had this funny feeling in my stomach as I watched the cloud continue to grow.  Prayer at this point would be useless.  If this was “it,” I was doomed.  But here’s the thing.  Even though I kept one eye on the cloud, I kept playing soccer.  Maybe I thought this was a false alarm because many of the events that were supposed to occur before the Second Coming hadn’t happened yet.  Wasn’t there supposed to be a Time of Trouble when the Catholics would assume power and imprison Adventists for going to church on Saturday rather than Sunday?  On the other hand, we were told that “no man knew the day nor the hour” of the Second Coming.  It was going to be a surprise.  Or maybe the cloud was just a fluke, that it was looking bigger simply because it was moving in our direction.  Or just maybe I was beginning to question the whole idea of a soon Second Coming.  

In any event, as the cloud grew larger it began to break up.  There was no Christ in the clouds, no trumpets sounding, no chorus of angels.  Then recess ended, and I went back to the classroom and never mentioned the cloud again.

In another six years, I had discarded my belief in God, including the whole Second Coming thing.

© 2019 John M. Phillips