I grew up being told Jesus could come back at any moment.

Not someday. Not eventually. Any. Moment.

As a kid, that hung over everything. Plan for the future? Why? Build something? For what? Some people I knew didn’t go to college because of it. Didn’t save for retirement. Didn’t make long-term plans. Why plant seeds in soil you’d never harvest?

It took me until my 40s to learn the uncomfortable truth: the theology behind all of it — the literal clouds-parting, trumpet-blaring return — wasn’t ancient doctrine. It was invented in the 1800s by a man named John Nelson Darby, a British preacher who systematized the whole framework between 1827 and 1833. Before him, eighteen centuries of Christianity hadn’t taught it. The church fathers didn’t preach it. The Reformers didn’t assume it.

It was new.

And yet it reshaped millions of lives.

When the Savior Changes, the Waiting Stays the Same

Here’s what I’ve noticed.

We stopped talking about the rapture quite as much. But we didn’t stop waiting for rescue.

Now it’s disclosure. Any day now, the government is going to reveal what it’s known for decades — that we’ve been visited, maybe even in contact, with beings not from here. Congress has held hearings. Whistleblowers have testified under oath. President Trump directed federal agencies in January 2026 to begin releasing classified UAP files. UAP is the new acronym for UFOs. The machinery of “something big is coming” has never been louder.

And maybe something is there. I hold that open. The universe is vast, and consciousness is stranger than we pretend. I don’t dismiss it. When I attend IANDS meetings, many people talk about aliens.

But I’ve also watched how the disclosure movement works. Barack Obama was supposed to be the disclosure president. Then Hillary Clinton. Then Biden. Then Trump — the first time. The cast keeps changing. The promise never arrives.

The government’s own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released a report in 2024 saying it found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings. The Wall Street Journal revealed that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been fed false stories about secret alien technology programs — described as something like a hazing ritual that got completely out of hand.

I’m not saying nothing is out there. A lot of people believe it and there’s a good chance it’s true that aliens are out there.

I’m saying: notice the pattern.

Rapture. Aliens. The New Age shift. The Age of Aquarius. The Great Reset. Pick your version.

We are very good at believing that someone — or something — from outside is about to arrive and change everything.

Why We Love the External Savior

I understand it. Deeply.

The world is exhausting. The problems feel too big. We have enough energy, food, and technology to end poverty many times over — and yet people are starving. We have enough wealth to transform lives — and instead we invent more precise ways to end them. Drones. Hypersonic missiles. AI-guided weapons.

And then there’s Epstein.

I used to roll my eyes at people who talked about Satanic pedophile rings as a shadow government. That was tin foil hat territory. Conspiracy thinking for people who couldn’t accept that the world was just ordinarily corrupt. I’m not a conspiracy-minded person.

I had to eat those words about conspiracy-minded things.

Because what came out wasn’t a theory. It was a documented reality. A billionaire ran a trafficking network that serviced some of the most powerful men in the world — politicians, financiers, royalty — for decades. People knew. People looked away. People were protected. People are still being protected. We’re finally just talking about the “Epstein class.”

And barely anyone was held accountable.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a confession, hidden in plain sight, that power at the highest levels operates by rules the rest of us don’t get to know about.

I’m not prone to seeing shadows everywhere. But I also can’t unsee what I’ve seen. And I think a lot of people are in that same place right now — not paranoid, just paying attention for the first time.

When the problems are that entrenched, of course, we want a deus ex machina.

Of course, we want the clouds to part, Jesus to come back and save us.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with grief, with loss, with people who’ve had to rebuild their entire understanding of reality from the ground up:

The external rescue isn’t coming. And it never had to.

Taking Jesus Seriously, at His Word

I’m not dismissing Jesus. I’m taking him seriously — at his own word.

The mystics — Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, the early contemplatives — understood the Second Coming differently than the Darby crowd that influenced the church I grew up in. Not as a man descending through clouds, but as the Christ consciousness awakening within human beings. The teachings finally being lived, not just recited.

Love your enemy. Care for the poor. Th...