The Last Ordinary Morning in Pompeii

On the morning of August 24, 79 AD, the residents of Pompeii woke to a day like any other. Bakers slid loaves into stone ovens. Merchants arranged figs and olives in the forum marketplace. A politician named Cuspius Pansa prepared for local elections — his campaign slogans still freshly painted on courtyard walls. Children played in the streets near the Temple of Apollo while their parents haggled over the price of wine.

Mount Vesuvius had rumbled for days, but no one in Pompeii had ever witnessed an eruption. The mountain had been quiet for eight hundred years. It was simply part of the scenery, a green slope where vineyards grew thick in the rich volcanic soil.

By early afternoon, a column of ash and pumice rocketed twelve miles into the sky. Within eighteen hours, the entire city lay buried under twenty feet of debris. Archaeologists would later uncover bodies frozen in the postures of daily life — a mother shielding her child, a man reaching for his coins, a dog still chained to a post.

Jesus told His disciples that the Son of Man would come just like the flood came upon those in Noah's day — while people were "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and they knew not until the flood came" (Matthew 24:38-39). Pompeii stands as a sobering reminder across the centuries: the Almighty does not arrange His schedule around our readiness. The call of Christ is not to predict the hour, but to live every ordinary morning as people already watching for His return.