"Definitions....................."

The weather, around here at least, has been really weird lately. Monday a rain storm blew through, its dark clouds dropping so low as to touch the earth, the sunlight so obscured as to make the expressway I was navigating at the time enveloped in thick, smoky darkness. While the downpour on that occasion remained merely enough to warrant an umbrella, it was followed Tuesday by a gulley-washer, several hours of what appeared to be heavenly rivers emptied into our midst, producing flooding that somehow avoided our immediate neighborhood, but covered the main road above us and just south of us with 8-10 inches of water. Tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes in diverse locations: surely there are those who must be seriously pondering the Mayan forecast for 2012. Whatever one’s views on Biblical prophecies, Nostradamus, and the Farmer’s Almanac, to me it all boils down to today, this hour, this moment, what if the next tick of the clock served me notice that it’s all over, my mood, I suppose, brought on by an early morning perusal of Psalms. “The ungodly,” it read, “shall not stand in the judgment.” People have all kinds of opinions about that final word, some believing themselves, as Christians, to be the ones escaping that part of eternity all together, some holding that the event is merely a matter of them receiving whatever rewards they earned in His service. It was, however, the first term that penetrated my thoughts. Just who are “the ungodly”? Who among us can boldly lay claim to that label? I like what the preacher brought forth last night, the particular way he chose to describe his status in Him. “In me,” he stated, “dwells a righteousness, a representative of the Godhead, holy in all that He is, and willing to walk with me in the mess that I am.” However it all comes to pass, He, alone, is my assurance……