No advanced notice before call to Heaven

Dave and I were talking on the phone early yesterday morning. I was relaxing, having a cup of coffee, when I heard a whirling noise above my house. A helicopter apparently was landing on my roof.

Even for me, this was not normal.

The engine noise continued, but by then it was somewhere over my pond...and then in my front yard... and then on my roof again. As I ran out my back door, I heard it in the front. Once I reached the front porch, it sounded as if it were landing on my deck. I was doing a play-by-play to Dave who, by now, thought I had had too much caffeine.

The cat-and-mouse game ended when I ran out on my front porch, only to see the helicopter tipped sideways, aiming its propeller at me, like I had been dropped into the middle of a Rambo sequel or something. I calmly (NOT!) told Dave that I was prepping to run somewhere, depending on where the chopper crashed. If it went right, I'd go left. If left, I'd bolt right.

Rambo would have been proud.

At the last second the helicopter righted itself and took off, heading somewhere to the north. And that was the end of that...except for what my mind conjured up all morning long.

Could it be that some pilot-intern was having mechanical problems and ended up crashing in a field a few miles away? Should I call 911?

What if some criminals were checking out how many people ran out of their houses when they whirled within a few feet of their roofs? Now they knew I was home alone.

Possibly some drug cartel was planting marijuana in the woods behind my house and the K.B.I. was surveying for evidence.

I was left wondering...

until that afternoon when my son, Adam, called. "Hey, Mom, did you notice anything unusual this morning?"

"Well, Son, unless you call a helicopter circling my house and almost landing on my head unusual, I guess not."

"That was ME, Mom. Pretty cool, don't you think?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah, we were filming for Buck Commander (a DVD about deer hunting) and the film crew decided to see where I grew up and where I played baseball at the college."

"Did it cross your mind, even for a minute, Son, to tell me this ahead of time?"

"Not really. I didn't think it was any big deal."

"Perhaps not to you, Captain Adventurer, but at my age it would have been nice to be forewarned."

Adam fails to realize that SOME of us appreciate a little advance planning.

1st Corinthians 15:52 tells us of another event and the kind of warning we can expect. "In the twinkling of an eye a trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised from the ground, and we Christians who are still alive will be caught up in the Heavens to meet our Lord."

Can you imagine? The time between the sounding of the trumpet and the raising up of the believers is described as the twinkling of an eye. How long is that? I realize it is a figure of speech, but what does it mean literally? The twinkling of an eye has been described as 1/6,000,000,000th of a second. Talk about no warning! We won't have time to run to our parents or children or to even make a phone call to tell our loved ones that time is up. There will be no chance to hide or fall on our knees and declare Jesus our Savior and to repent of our sins.

Scripture says in the "twinkling of an eye." Maybe there is not urgency if one wants to delay making a decision about eternity. After all, one can wait until the trumpet sounds and then there will be one six-billionth of a second to make a decision. That should be plenty of time, don't you think?