"Peace."
The First Day of the Second Coming
GUEST BLOG / By All of Us--The first light came without a sound. No trumpets, no thunders, no cinematic clouds parting like velvet curtains. Dawn simply arrived—clearer, purer, as if the sun had been polished overnight. People noticed the quality of it first. In Mexico City, the smog lifted. In Beijing, blue returned to the sky. In New York, the Hudson shimmered as if it had been scrubbed clean by invisible hands.
Meteorologists were the first to go live. “Anomalous refraction,” one said. “Solar interference,” said another. But no one could explain the subtle vibration that accompanied the light—a frequency felt rather than heard, like standing too close to a cathedral organ. It didn’t stop. It hummed inside bones and concrete alike, a tuning fork struck by something celestial.
At precisely 6:00 a.m. Jerusalem time, every bell in the Old City began to ring. Not by human hand—clappers swung on their own. In Rome, the same. In Paris, the bells of Notre Dame, still under restoration after decades of work, pealed with impossible perfection. In San Diego, parishioners at St. Joseph’s reported hearing Gregorian chant though no choir had gathered. Across continents, mosques filled with spontaneous adhan—calls to prayer in voices unrecorded.
Then came the quiet. A total stillness, as if the world had collectively held its breath.
***
In author Dan Brown’s universe, the divine tends to arrive encoded—messages hidden in frescoes, Fibonacci sequences, or encrypted papal archives. But this, if it could be called divine, was utterly unencrypted. It was plain, direct, impossible to misread. At 7:07 a.m. local time—everywhere—the light concentrated over the eastern horizon. Witnesses later said it was like a second sun rising, though softer, with edges blurred by compassion itself.
Air-traffic control centers reported the phenomenon first. Every radar, every satellite, every thermal camera locked onto the same coordinates: a figure descending at a constant velocity, human in outline, clothed not in white robes but in light itself.
***
By the time He reached ground level—if “He” can still be used for one who seemed beyond gender, nation, or creed—the crowd had gathered spontaneously. Some ran toward Him; others fell to their knees. The figure stepped onto the ancient stones near the Mount of Olives. Sandaled feet, dusty, unremarkable. The robe, woven of light and air. The eyes, unfathomable—each color known to humankind reflected in shifting order, like galaxies rearranging themselves for inspection.
A child approached first. [We knew it all along that it would be a child]. She carried a cracked plastic toy—a lamb missing a wheel. He knelt to her height and took it gently, as if it were a relic of the first creation.
“Do you know me?” He asked.
She nodded without words.
“Then tell them I have returned.”
The child’s voice was broadcast somehow—through phones, radios, even dormant televisions. Every screen flickered to life. “He says He’s back,” she said, simple as that.
***
The Vatican issued a statement within the hour. But not before the President of the United States shouted for all to hear "I invited him, first." Then within a gasp a lightning bolt struck him and turned him into a solid sack of shit emblazoned with Stephen Miller's face.
Some how the Pontiff returned to the airways: “We remain cautious but prayerful,” said the pontiff, trembling under the blinding clarity of Rome’s noon light. “The Church has awaited this day for millennia. May our hearts be ready.” In Mecca, scholars debated whether prophecy had reached its completion. In New Delhi, pilgrims filled the ghats. In San Francisco, skeptics streamed onto Telegraph Hill with smartphones raised, live-casting disbelief. Every religion saw in Him its own reflection. The Buddhists called Him the Maitreya. The Muslims whispered Isa al-Masih. The Hindus saw the Kalki avatar.
The scientists, unwilling to surrender vocabulary, called it an “interdimensional manifestation.”
But labels failed, melting under the sheer gravity of presence.
And then He spoke again—not from His mouth, but directly into the architecture of the mind. “Peace,” He said. “Begin again.” The phrase was simple enough to fit on a protest sign, yet vast enough to rewrite history.
***
On that first day, miracles were not cinematic. They were administrative. In Lagos, power grids rebooted without command.
In Ukraine, soldiers found their weapons jammed with flowers—where they came from, no one knew.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange closed itself.
The Pentagon’s encrypted network filled with one sentence repeated endlessly: All deniers will be shot.
Reporters scrambled.
Was it artificial intelligence, an alien event, a deepfake crafted by new world governments?
Conspiracy theorists shouted from basements, but the bandwidth belonged to something larger. The light disrupted nothing; it only clarified. People could no longer lie. Politicians died on the spot.
Networks uttered words formed in the mind and emerged truthfully, stripped of pretense. Politicians stuttered into silence.
Preachers wept as they're 401ks plummeted in worth.
Bankers refunded debt.
And everywhere, clocks stopped at 11:11.
***
A journalist in London—let’s call her Maria, a skeptic since baptism—found herself writing not analysis but confession. “For years,” she typed, “I treated faith as fiction, but fiction seems the only vessel wide enough to hold today.” She uploaded her article without title. Within minutes, her words appeared simultaneously on every news site on Earth.
The byline changed to All of Us.
By afternoon, the figure had walked west. Oceans parted, not physically but perceptually—people could see through water as if it were glass. Beneath the Atlantic, coral cities glowed like Christmas lanterns. Dolphins followed His wake, singing in octaves unheard since Genesis. Crowds multiplied, yet no stampede occurred. The air thickened with calm. Even predators forgot their hunger. On the Serengeti, lions slept beside antelope. In Los Angeles, traffic dissolved into voluntary stillness. A city built on motion suddenly remembered stillness. And still, He walked down Wilshire Boulevard ignoring the new LA subways.
***
Theologians once argued whether the Second Coming would be judgment or renewal or a Spielburg epic with a Mel Brooks lead. The answer, it seemed, was neither and both.
Judgment came not from fire but from reflection. Each person saw themselves through His gaze and understood, instantly, every kindness given, every cruelty ignored. For some, the illumination was unbearable; they fled into darkness, only to find the darkness gone.
In Times Square, billboards went blank except one. It displayed no brand, only a pulse of light timed to each human heartbeat. Beneath it, a street preacher dropped his placard and simply said, “We were right and wrong all along.”
By evening, nations met via emergency link because all the bars had closed.
“How do we govern this?” one president asked. “Do we yield sovereignty to a celestial authority?”
Another replied, “We already have.” Treaties, wars, alliances—all seemed child’s play in comparison to the wordless government unfolding in the air.
No commandments were issued. No armies marched. The only policy was presence. Those who wished to follow were told, “Feed the hungry.” Those who doubted were told the same. The light dimmed slightly, enough for stars to reappear. That night, astronomers noticed constellations rearranging. Orion’s Belt bent toward the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper formed a question mark with a trademark sign.
***
By midnight, miracles grew personal. A blind woman in Rio saw her mother’s face for the first time. A refugee in Gaza felt her lost son’s hand in hers. An addict in Chicago set down the needle and found the will to live. All those that a former president stiffed in business deals invaded Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Not through magic, but recognition. “You are seen,” said the voice in every heart. “Now see each other.” Hospitals reported spontaneous recoveries. Cemeteries glowed faintly, as if the dead were turning over—not in protest, but in awe. No graves opened, yet no one feared them anymore.
The first day ended not with apocalypse, but understanding. Apocalypse, after all, means “revelation.” Humanity finally grasped that the kingdom was never elsewhere—it had always been latent in the space between compassion and courage.
At 11:59 p.m., the figure stood once more before the gathered multitudes, the light dimmed to moon-brightness. “Tomorrow,” He said, “you decide whether I stay. And in the meantime all religious organizations return all monies they collected back to the poor or be rendered into dust within a week. And then He vanished into the second sunrise.
A week later, the world ended as a majestic dust storm [of a size never seen before] engulfed the planet for 40 days and 40 nights destroying all the temples.
Only the cockroaches survived.
###
Editor’s note: Some will dismiss this as allegory, as myth-making for an age addicted to immediacy or simply tommyrot. Perhaps. But if the Second Coming were to happen in our century of satellites and surveillance, wouldn’t it unfold exactly like this—broadcast in every language, humbling every algorithm, reminding us that the end of the world might simply mean the end of our blindness?
Until then, the light lingers. We tremble as morning nears hoping the sun rises on one more day. “Peace,” He said and "let's reboot."
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