Ragnarok's Valley

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

In a literature class one time, we were assigned to read selections of Norse myth.
The most vivid for me was the account of Ragnarok (which Richard Wagner translated
into German for the title of his opera Gotterdammerung, "The Twilight of the Gods").

Ragnarok was the great final battle that was the end of the world.  I can't remember
all the participants and their strange names, or the exact sequence of events: but the
entire world was inundated in water, and then burned with fire, the sun and the moon
disappeared, all living things died, and then all the gods and monsters fought to their
mutual deaths.

The next line of the story I remember as something like "After all the gods and the entire
earth had been destroyed, a man and a woman crept out of the valley where they had
been hiding."

Wait . . . WHAT !?!?...  We're expected to suspend our disbelief when we read mythology:
but should we also suspend logic, and commonsense ?  All living things, even the gods,
have been wiped out: the whole earth, and the heavens, were destroyed:.  Fortunate
man and woman, to have hidden in a valley where none of these events effected them
in the least !

I've gotten some replies to the e-mail I sent friends last week, about the question satan's
forced on the world whether Jesus is actually the Messiah, that I've had to react to with
the same incredulousness.  Replies about "spiritual struggles going on in my life right now,"
or that "I'm always trying to grow closer to the Lord:" even one that "I don't vote."

Wait . . . WHAT !?!?...the ultimate spiritual question of all time, for all the earth, is being
fought out, and the battle-lines of earth's final war are being drawn.  But all that has
nothing to do with my friends' personal spiritual struggles, or personal holiness...or voting ?!?

Fortunate friends !  to have found a personal "valley" where the approach of Armageddon
doesn't effect them in the least !