My journey to becoming an author had its roots in high school when I first became interested in eschatology, which is the study of Biblical end time events. I took a nearly 30-year detour to be a businessman in New York City—a time that I value greatly. And then my mother’s stroke threw me into the role of caregiver right around the time that the Mayan calendar end date created such a buzz. 

Basically, the social meme went like this: The Mayan long-count calendar suddenly stopped at December 21, 2012. In anticipation of that event, there was a veritable flurry of articles and television shows speculating about the meaning of that date. Here are some of the major items espoused:

• The Mayans had great astronomical knowledge about a coming catastrophe.
• The end of the Mayan calendar represented the end of an age and a time of word-wide transformation would occur.
• The Mayans had extraterrestrial contact and had pre-knowledge of a specific date of alien contact given by our space brothers.

Well, I don’t need to tell you that December 21, 2012 came and went without much fanfare—no asteroid impact, no New Age harmonic convergence, and no alien contact. But still I was intrigued. The Mayan end-date had tapped into something primordial in the heart of humanity: a sense that things are out of control and that they can’t go on as they are for much longer. It was then that I started to look at other civilizations to realize that Hopi prophecies of the end of the age point to this generation as well. There is a push in Islam to see this as the generation to welcome the Mahdi. Reconstituted Israel has had many rabbinical predictions of the Messiah coming in this generation.

Of course, my particular belief is that we’re close to Christ’s return. The Biblical prophecies keep stacking up, beginning with the rebirth of Israel in 1948.

Are we the generation to see unprecedented global events? Do you feel that same primordial urge tapped by the Mayan calendar debate? Do you feel that something has got to give? That the world is marching irrevocably to a dangerous future? The This Generation Series explores these questions.