“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Nor viruses?
Will your postal carrier soon be delivering more than just your mail to your residence or business?
Currently the Postal Service adds 4,071 addresses to their delivery network every day. Each day the Postal Service processes and delivers 187.8 million pieces of First-Class Mail. On average, the Postal Service processes 20.2 million mail pieces each hour, 336,649 each minute and 5,611 each second. This does not include UPS or Fed-Ex deliveries.
Soon, what else might all of them possibly be delivering?
On a single delivery day, the average mail carrier will probably come into direct contact with thousands (if not more) items of mail from across the country, and in some cases, from around the world. They will touch literally every single piece of mail they deliver, not to mention what they may come into contact with at their facility (including possibly infected co-workers) before embarking on their daily “appointed rounds.”
Then they climb into their rolling virus-incubation mobiles to disburse the contents to every home and business on their routes.
Then those carriers will touch literally every mailbox, mail slot and possibly door handle and elevator button on their routes (and perhaps even the recipients themselves). Keep in mind, those mail carriers not only have direct contact with the items they deliver, but I think, even more importantly, the items they also pick up – many containing direct human saliva. I say that because those are the only type of envelopes I currently have on hand.
Add to that the number of humans (and pets, according to recent reports) that same mail carrier will come within breathing, sneezing or coughing distance of during the course of a single work day – then, of course, extrapolate the number of people those people will then come into direct and/or indirect contact with for up to the next 14 days before they even show any symptoms of being infected.
I tried to think of any other way to spread a highly contagious virus faster than via the United States Postal Service…and I couldn’t. Not domestic and/or international air travel. Not mass transit systems. Not giant and packed entertainment arenas. Not even cruise ships (and we see how that’s working out). There is no other entity on the planet that even comes close to the number of people the USPS or their mail comes into direct contact with on a weekly, daily, hourly or by-the-minute basis.
There simply is nothing more effective or faster to spread a highly contagious virus “globally” than the USPS, and you do not even have to leave your house to become infected. It comes right to your door – then through your door and into your home and/or business – and it arrives 5 days a week…every week, despite snow, rain, heat, gloom of night, or soon possibly a virus.
This scenario means that every single man, woman, child and apparently pet in the United States now has the possibility of being infected with a deadly contagion without ever leaving their house or even coming within sight of another individual.
Those who are familiar with the Bible and Jesus’ own teachings on the state of the world at the time of the Rapture will note – they all describe a world that seems, at least economically speaking, to be operating normally; marrying, travelling, buying, selling, planting, building, etc. Well, it’s only been a few weeks and none of those things are happening anymore in China – and if the rate-of-spread numbers being reported are even remotely correct, that will soon be the state of the rest of the world as well, which is the exact opposite of the conditions the Bible seemingly describes as being present at the time of the Rapture of the Church.
Were Jesus and the Prophets wrong? Did this virus situation catch God by surprise? If the answer to those two questions are no and definitely no – and if this virus continues spreading just at the rate it has been since we first learned about it – and soon possibly, if not probably, the entire world being in the same situation that China currently is in, then maybe that’s why Jesus said that we would know when His coming was near, even at the door?
We may not know the hour or the day when (or if) what’s currently happening in China eventually sweeps the entire planet – but based on the current spread-rate numbers, it sure looks like the world’s “situation normal” factor is rapidly diminishing by the day because of the Coronavirus. If so, that could well mean the Church Age is also diminishing just as rapidly.
If this scenario is true – while you’re telling your unsaved friends and family to stop accepting their mail – you may also want to suggest they start “accepting” Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. If He is indeed “at the door,” keep this in mind: from the day Jesus first spoke those words, a door was and still is only about 2 inches thick. With the average human foot being about 12 inches long (hence the term “foot” I guess), then where does His very next step put Him? Just as importantly – where does it put us?
There may be something else that brings mail delivery to a sudden halt besides a virus. Perhaps even in the next “twinkling of an eye.”
Maranatha,
Phil Kreider