Just Imagine

The following is based on nothing but my imagination and what I have concluded from what I can remember having seen and heard over my lifetime. The only thing I looked up was how to spell Coliseum. So if you wish to take issue with dates, places, and sequence, have at it and let me know. None of those details are part of my point.

Fact according to both written and verbal history: Christians were persecuted in Rome. Heads were cut off, people burned alive and used as torches for light sources, or thrown to lions in the Coliseum.

Questions:

• Were they sorted according to age and gender, and were the women and children spared?
• Will the Iranian wild man allow Jewish women and children to evacuate and engage the men in a fair battle for Israel's existence?
• Did Saddam whisk away the wife and children when daddy was jammed in the wood chipper feet first, thrown in the acid pool, or had a body part cut off?
• Did not Saddam's men shoot a baby while being held in his mother's arms?
• Did we not see photos of dead and swollen women and toddlers after Saddam's experiment of biological weaponry? You know, those WMDs we couldn't find?
  

I imagine cheering crowds in the Coliseum watching whole families lined up side by side or huddled together, mothers and fathers trying to shield their children from the lions' jaws, grandparents standing in front of them as if to fill the lions' stomachs before they reached the crying toddler. Others attempting to run away from the huddled as a diversionary tactic in order to distract the lions from friends and loved ones. I imagine the bloody failure of all these attempts. I imagine tears, screams of pain, anguish, pure terror in the hearts of these whose only crime was adopting a new faith in a loving savior.

I also imagine the crowd hearing sounds of prayers, praise songs, expressions of joy in knowing their future, peace in the midst of horror.

I imagine the concentration camps in Germany. Women and children were indeed separated from the men only to take them from anyone who could fight for them, herded into the so-called showers and instead gassed with cyanide, to experience a very painful death. I see helpless children screaming and choking, puking blood in front of their mothers, who were also dying equally horrible deaths as their children watched in terror.

I imagine lines of Christians who refused to comply with a world religion, a hybrid including sympathy toward Muslims and total rejection of anything Christian or Jewish. I see whole families who converted to Christianity after witnessing the disappearance of neighbors, coworkers, babies and children, the unborn leaving a sudden voids in wombs, all standing in line waiting to be beheaded. I imagine them being forced to watch and being ordered to take the mark or die themselves. Worse, I imagine these events being televised and those who took the mark either cheering every blood gush, or regretting their decision to sell their future for food.

I imagine close-ups of the faces of people I know, people I love, people I haven't witnessed to, either being martyred or damned forever. I even imagine the faces of those who've hurt me and realize that forgiveness doesn't hurt me especially if it means preventing that person from experiencing the worst of the worst of all mankind's inhumanity to man, past, present, and future.

I imagine being caught up in the air to meet my Savior, of the impossibility of having my tears dried, knowing all who were left behind.

I imagine there will be horror and bloodshed between this minute and the Rapture. Whether it is pre, mid, post, or pan, as in "it will all pan out," I want to prepare for a lot of ugly before the ugliest of the tribulation.

Just imagine.