The Last Meeting

Joseph Putnam was desperately fighting to stay awake. It was a tough challenge for him; he had risen from bed before 5am just to attend this meeting and it was now approaching midnight. Putnam had thought the meeting was an important one, but as the day wore on he wondered if it was even possible to find a bigger waste of time.

The Silmara Holding Corporation was having its quarterly board meeting today, and as a member of the board of directors Putnam was expected to be there. He probably could have gotten out of it, but doing so might have damaged his career and he had worked for too long to risk damaging his connections. He was already comfortably well off, but as wiser men have found, having a few million in the bank doesn’t mean you couldn’t use a few million more.

Putnam tried to get his attention back to what the speaker was saying. What’s that? Oh, something about a merger – no, a hostile takeover, it seemed. The speaker was suggesting that they should purchase some corporation on Ganymede (did Ganymede have any corporations? he wondered) by purchasing all its stock. Once they had its stock, they could dismember the company, sell off its parts, lay off a lot of workers, and when it was all over they’d have made a profit of some upteen million dollars.

There was a movement on the table – Finney again. Putnam groaned; Finney seemed to object to everything. What was it this time? Something about the ethics of hostile takeovers and harm to the families of the people who are laid off. Finney, Putnam thought, just didn’t get it: the purpose of life – and especially holding companies – was to make money, and you can’t make money by watching out for the little people. As he expected, Finney’s motion was voted down. He wondered briefly how Finney ever managed to rise to the board of directors; he just didn’t seem to have the guts to succeed. Where did people like him come from, anyway?

Putnam woke with a start; had he been asleep? He poured himself some more coffee and tried to wake himself up. When he was young he had no problem working all hours of the day and night, but he was in his late 50’s now and his lifestyle was beginning to take its toll. He wondered how his family was doing; they were probably all in bed now – not that he ever saw them. He wished fervently that he had scheduled a vacation today so he didn’t have to sit through this endless meeting.

Someone had stood up and was showing some sort of presentation; there were lines, and graphs, and some kind of text that was far too small to be seen. Putnam snickered; this guy obviously didn’t have a single presentation skill to his name. Everyone knew not to put that much text on a slide; you had to keep it sparse to make it readable and keep people’s attention. The presentation looked like it had been slapped together in an awful hurry. Putnam was tempted to stand up and tell him that if he couldn’t put in enough overtime to make a decent presentation that he should find another line of work, but he was too tired to make the effort.

His thoughts briefly wandered. He’d really done pretty well: it had taken a lot of work and a lot of long hours, but he had a huge home, millions in the bank, and a sparkling resume. He was in good shape. It’s true that his three marriages had bombed and he had no relationship with his kids, but hey – he was successful, and that was what counted. Right? Finney would probably disagree, but then Finney didn’t have the bank account he did. You had to make sacrifices if you wanted to get ahead in life.

Outside the large glass windows of the conference room he saw a dark sky with twinkling stars. It was a beautiful night, but he had seen too many of them. What was he doing at work this late? He fervently wished he was asleep in bed.

All the sudden his drowsiness left him instantly. Outside, a brilliant light began to shine: the sky light up as if the morning sun had risen, only this light was more piercing than any sunlight he had ever seen. He gasped and rose to his feet. What on earth was going on? Was this what a nuclear blast looked like? Horrible thoughts ran though his mind and he wondered if he was about to die.

However, a shockwave never hit. No buildings dissolved; the light just became brighter and clearer. He had never seen anything like it, and he found himself unable to tear away his gaze. Had the sun gone nova? He didn’t understand. Far off – and yet not far off at all – he heard a strange, deep sound. He didn’t recognize the melody but it chilled his bones and filled him with dread. He wondered what it meant and what was going on. Part of him hoped it meant the meeting was over and he could go home.

Everyone in the room was standing and yet was silent; each was looking out the window and gazing into the distance. Putnam noticed with surprise that Finney was gone; he wondered when he had left. Maybe Finney had finally lost his mind. He never did seem very sane; his only care seemed to be about living for Jesus – whatever that meant.

Someone shouted “Look at that!” Putnam turned, and was shocked to see all sorts of people flying deep into the sky, as if gravity had taken the day off. Putnam rubbed his eyes and looked again, and the image didn’t go away: people by the thousands were everywhere. He would have thought this was proof he was dreaming if there wasn’t a terrible feeling that something very bad had just happened. Were aliens abducting the entire population of Earth?

Putnam continued to wonder what was going on until he caught sight of something in the sky – a person of some sort. No, he suddenly realized, it was The Person. He was incredibly glorious; light emanated from him so fierce and hot that he could not bear to look upon him, and yet he could not tear his gaze away. The Person’s face was awful to look upon: it pierced his very soul and turned his heart to stone. Putnam felt himself die inside just by looking upon this Man, and it only got worse when the Man looked at him.

All at once he knew what was happening. Long ago, his mother had made him go to Sunday School and they had taught him that one day a man called Jesus would come back. Putnam didn’t remember a lot of the details – he had no time for church – but he suddenly remembered something about a trumpet sounding and Jesus coming back from the sky and His followers meeting Him in the air. The world, he realized, had ended; this was the last day. The meeting was over, and he could go home!

Then reality hit him. The world couldn’t end yet, he heard himself screaming. He wasn’t ready! He still had another ten years before he could retire, and he wasn’t Chairman of the Board yet. His house wasn’t fully paid for, his stock options had not been exercised, and his boat was still being designed. He still had at least thirty years left in his life; how could the world end now?

Other thoughts began to enter his mind as the gaze of the Person pierced him. His wife! What had he done? All those years of caring more for work than for her, and now it was too late to do anything. He had worked so many late nights that knew the janitorial staff of his office better than his own kids, and now he could never make it right. He had never cared before, but he now saw how foolish he had been. Why hadn’t he thought of these things before?

Images began to form in his mind. What else had his Sunday School teacher said so long ago? Something about being brought before a great white throne, where the books would be opened and he would be judged by what was written in them. He cringed at the thought; he had a feeling that the Person would be judging him along very different lines than his coworkers had. This Person was not interested in bank accounts but in kindness and love and obedience and sacrifice – things he thought were an utter waste of time.

There was something else, he remembered – something about having your name written in a book of life. Putnam knew that his name was not, and that Finney’s probably was. He had a feeling this was bad, but he didn’t remember why – and then he remembered.

As the weight of everything piled upon him he began to be overcome with horror. What was going to happen to him now? He had never paid much attention to preaching; he had figured it was all a bunch of nonsense anyway. He never really expected the world to end, and he definitely did not ever expect to see a very real Jesus return to judge the world. He thought it was just a figure of speech or something; it wasn’t real – not in the same way that hostile takeovers were real. But there it was, big as life, and it was now too late. He saw thousands of people outside in the air rejoicing, with multitudes joining them; for them this was a day to rejoice, but for him it was a day of doom – a fate worse than death.

He wished fervently that all this was just a bad dream – that he had just fallen asleep in that everlasting meeting, and that he’d wake up any minute now and find it all been a dream. Putnam ached to undo his past or cover it somehow, but it was too late for that. As he watched the scenes unfold outside he knew that this was no dream, but that very soon it would turn into a nightmare.