There is this poem, by Yeats, that has troubled me for years.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

I believe in the Second Coming, not as Yeats did, but I believe. I feel sometimes we are close. I feel the collective despair and fear and anger of the world held in a basin for years is ready to be poured out. The words of Revelation 1:7 echo in my mind even now.

“Look, he is coming with the clouds,”^[b]
    and “every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him”;
    and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”^[c]
So shall it be! Amen.

AND YET

I have this hope that God is always good and that He has a good plan for saving those who want that salvation.

I have this hope that God’s goodness dwells in people who choose it, and in these days is still expressed in love that overcomes despair and fear and anger.

I have this hope that where people of faith dwell the darkness that threatens to engulf the world will be held back.

I have this hope that this little town where I live is one of those places where love and faith will grow and the darkness will be swallowed up in the light of people who will work together to bring about the good.

I cannot stop what is coming on the world, but I can help make a boundary across which that darkness cannot cross for a time.