Editorial Notes

This episode is about prophecy. Now, there’s a lot of stuff out there about Biblical prophesy, and I doubt I could say anything on this subject that hasn’t been said before.

So, I thought I’d tell a story that might never be told unless I tell it. It’s the story of a prophet, of sorts, that I was privileged to meet many years ago.

I attended a very large state university during the early 1980’s. There is large business district near this university, and I walked through it most every day to and from the bus stop.

Every once in a while, I would see a very strange looking car either parked or slowly driving down the "main drag" of the university business district. This car, to the best of my memory, had signs on the trunk, roof, and hood. I don’t remember exactly what the signs said, but I do remember a large sign with a cartoon bear and eagle looking menacingly at each other. I also remember at least one propeller mounted on the roof pointing forward. It was quite a spectacle to see. How could such a car be street legal?

It seemed to me that this person was trying to advertise the fact that he knew how to end the "cold war" between the USA and the USSR. I don’t remember the details of the signs on his car because at the time I simply didn’t care. I thought he was a "crackpot".

A few years later I was living in a rental house with several other single people. One day one of my housemates had a friend who lived about a mile away and needed a ride home. No problem! I volunteered, and a few minutes later we arrived at a huge house with that monstrosity of a car parked out front!

It turned out that my housemate’s friend was renting a room in the house owned by the "crackpot" who drove that funny looking car that I’d seen near the university throughout all my college career. I finally had a chance to meet this guy.

We talked for a few minutes, and he explained to me the message that he was trying to get across with his car and all the signes. It was his idea that the cold war would end when the people decided it would end. The Berlin Wall would come down when the people decided to take it down. It was all that simple. When enough people decided that they weren’t going to let that wall keep them apart, the wall would come down.

To me this was sheer lunacy. Like most people back then, I "knew" that the Earth wasn’t big enough for the Americans and the Soviets, and that one day there would probably be a colossal thermonuclear war. It was only a question of when this would occur, not if. I hoped to be able to live a normal life and die before the inevitable destruction of my country and most of the civilized world.

It was completely obvious to me that nuclear annihilation was certain to happen. The only alternative scenario was that the United States might someday elect a bunch of raving pacifist liberals into government who would proceed to scrap our military and allow the Soviets to conquer and enslave us. Anyone who thought that all the animosity between East and West would simply go away when the people wanted it to was quite simply a nut case.

Several years later, the Berlin Wall came down just the way the "crackpot" with the weird car said it would. As far as I could tell, he was alone in his beliefs, but he turned out to be right. I held the same point of view of millions of people, and I turned out to be wrong. The "nut case" with the weird car had some strange gift of insight that I wonder about to this day.

He only lived a few blocks from me. I might have learned a lot from him if I wanted to, but I had better things to do. As I said, it was a privelege to meet him. Sadly, I didn’t know what a privelege it was until many years later.

This story really doesn’t have much to do with the cartoon below. For some reason, this just seemed like a good place to tell it.

Web Shepherd