It is the playground of the world. There is everything for the vacationer—beautiful, luxurious hotels and restaurants and shops-and tourists flock there from all over the globe to enjoy them and to share in the lights and music and laughter and illusion of the big entertainment complexes. You can call it Pleasure World.
Not far away there is a different world. A place where workers arm weapons of war, terrible weapons of destruction. Stored there are warheads, rocket motors, and fully armed missiles, waiting—waiting. Security cameras watch silently over hundreds of missiles. Over a million pounds of missiles and rockets rest quietly in the so-called “Remote Area”—remote no longer.
Once it was really remote, with a wide belt of vacant land for safety around it. Now progress and development have encroached and encircled it until they almost meet across the chain link fence that separates them. Is it still safe?
What if—a terrorist targeted one of the metal storage buildings and started a fire? The motors are packed with extremely volatile fuel.
What if—lightning started a fire in the grounds? On an average, lightning hits each square mile in Central Florida fifty times a year. That means an average of 125 strikes in the remote area every year.
What if-the more than thirty thousand motorists who daily drive as close as one-fifth of a mile (that’s only a little more than feet) to some of those stockpiles of disaster were aware of the possibilities? Would they perhaps choose another route? Or would a little of the glitter be rubbed off the shining playground?
Probably not.
It’s just human nature to think: I don’t see anything wrong. It has never happened. It can’t happen to ME! The It-can’t-happen-here syndrome is widespread.
Why not? In a world and time when we are increasingly sure of only uncertainties, how many people actually sit down and think seriously: Tomorrow I might not be here? How many consider, I could die tonight?
Has it ever occurred to you?
No one is immune to disaster. No one has a guaranteed lifetime. But that is only for the here-and-now. There is something beyond; it is called eternity. Forever. And that is guaranteed. Whether it is reached sooner or later is not important; what really matters is where will it be spent?
There are only two places: one is with God, who is light and love. The other is away from Him, which necessarily means being away from light. It means darkness, the blackness of darkness forever. It means being away from love, all love, in a place of “weeping and wailing.”
Tonight, tomorrow, twenty years from now it is still “appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:2727And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: (Hebrews 9:27)).
Is anything more important than being prepared for that?