The Last Morning in Pompeii

On August 24, 79 AD, the residents of Pompeii woke to an ordinary summer day. Bakers slid loaves into stone ovens. Merchants arranged figs and olives in the forum marketplace. A politician named Cuspius Pansa had campaign slogans freshly painted on the walls of Via dell'Abbondanza. Children played in courtyards while their parents planned evening dinner parties.

Mount Vesuvius had rumbled for days. Small earthquakes rattled dishes. Springs dried up mysteriously on the mountain's slopes. The warnings were there — visible, tangible, impossible to miss. But the people of Pompeii had lived beneath that mountain for generations. They had always been fine before.

By afternoon, a column of superheated ash shot twenty miles into the sky. By the next morning, the entire city lay buried under twenty feet of volcanic debris. Archaeologists would later uncover bodies frozen in the postures of their last ordinary moments — a woman reaching for her jewelry, a man asleep on a bench, a dog still chained to a post.

Jesus told His disciples that the days before His return would look exactly like this — people eating, drinking, marrying, going about the rhythms of daily life, paying no attention to the signs. "Therefore keep watch," He urged, "because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." The call of Matthew 24 is not to live in fear, but to live in faithful readiness — so that no ordinary morning catches us unprepared for the extraordinary arrival of the King.