People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles, this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom. Fr. Rolheiser writes that there have been speculations about the world’s end ever since. The early Christians took Jesus’ advice and believed it was useless and counterproductive to speculate about the end of the world and what signs would accompany it. Instead, they believed, the lesson was to live in vigilance, on high alert, ready, so that the end, whenever it would come, would not catch them asleep, unprepared, carousing, and drunk. However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not return, their understanding began to evolve so that by the time John’s Gospel was written, probably about seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had started to understand things differently: They now understood Jesus’ promise that some of his contemporaries would not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of God as being fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was, in fact, already back, and the world had not ended. And so they began to believe that the world’s end was not necessarily imminent. Now, that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s own death. More deeply, the invitation to live in vigilance began to be understood as code for God’s invitation to enter into the fullness of life right now and not be lulled asleep by the pressures of ordinary life, wherein we are consumed with eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. All of these ordinary things, while good in themselves, can lull us to sleep by keeping us from being truly attentive and grateful within our own lives. The end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is in what state our dying will find us.