It was the third day of three that shook the world, and I was watching CNN with a friend. Events had been unfolding at a fantastic pace. The Coup was crumbling. Boris Yeltsin was holding firm. And now Mother Russia was staging a dramatic resurrection from the dead. We sat watching, breathless, as the live report from Moscow concluded.

Then my friend whirled on me.

"Here's what's gonna happen next. Gorby's gonna receive this massive head wound. Then he's gonna get better. And then the whole world is gonna follow him around. And Yeltsin will be his prophet."

I smiled at this unsolicited further analysis, but only to be polite. Actually, I was a little annoyed -- because I knew my friend was only half-joking; he was secretly afraid that he was speaking the truth. And I didn't like being included in his whistle past the graveyard, lest that be taken as an admission that I am haunted by the same ghosts.

For those of you who are feeling like you missed something here, you probably did. You would have had to be there.

In this case, "there" was and is that particular Christian subculture which sees in every world crisis a fufillment of Biblical prophecy. We who were raised in the Charismatic hinterlands during the late 60s and 70s can hardly watch the news even today without checking events against Hal Lindsey's End Times calandar.

I remember reading The Late Great Planet Earth and similar books in grade school, and then rushing off to school to provoke long-winded arguments with my friends. "Haven't you heard? The government is already working on the mark of the beast. The IRS is stamping '666' on income tax forms. Your name is in a computer in Belgium."

Now, in the right circles, this sort of thing can make you a star. I found out real quick there's a certain breed who swallow that stuff without chewing and beg for more. But I also found -- and it bugged me to death -- that there was this one kid named Engberg who never really bought any of it.

Despite countless disscussions -- sometimes heated -- during lunch, the self-assured Engberg wouldn't budge from his skepticism. That he wouldn't convert was a source of disappointment to me, but I took comfort in knowing that Engberg would get his in the Great Tribulation.

As for me, I wasn't making any plans past high school graduation. The Second Coming would save me from both the Great Tribulation and the nasty business of growing up.

From the latter tribulation, alas, I was not spared.

And in the years since high school, I have come to understand that many good people around the world and throughout history have suffered worse things without the benefit of a Rapture.

While some middle class American Christians have been whiling away the Last Days with speculations about when the Great Tribulation will begin, believers and non-believers alike have been subjected elsewhere to police states and tortures and genocides for decade on end.

This reduction of the awful events of the 20th century to a list of prophetic puzzle pieces is, of course, just one more way of coping with the unspeakable. But in so making abstract human suffering, there lies the temptation to view history as a spectator instead of a participant, to weigh each new atrocity according to its utility in completing God's final "To Do" list.

One of our key events on the End Times Watcher's Checklist has always been the invasion of Israel by the Soviet Union. (This we got from passages in the book of Ezekial, in which a great power to the uttermost north of Israel, known as "Gog and Magog", attacks Israel in "future times.")

And, since this happening came to be viewed by many of us as virtually past tense, the suffering of the Soviet people under totalitarian rule had been taken for granted as something that would continue until the very end of time.

Thus, from my childhood, I have heard prayers in church for those in Communist countries undergoing persecution for their faith. But those prayers were always that the persecuted believers be given the strength to bear their sufferings. Never once did I hear anyone pray that those believers be given also their freedom.

But somebody somewhere must have been praying.

I remember the morning I heard the Berlin Wall had fallen during the night. In fact, I was still half-asleep when I heard the radio news reporter make that announcement. My eyes bugged out and I stopped buttoning my shirt and ran over to crank the volume and hear him repeat the news.

It was true! This terrible symbol of death and stalemate which had endured my entire life was gone without warning. Talk about thief in the night! The German people were dancing on the Berlin wall! And the Soviet guards stood gaping in the same astonishment as everybody else.

That evening, I came home from work to find my wife sitting in front of the television with a West German medical student who lived down the hall. The two ladies were having a wonderful, quiet cry together as they watched the German people celebrating in the no-longer divided Berlin.

All of us who had lived out our entire existence under the Cold War cosmology suddenly had to apply some Perestroika to our worldviews. At the same time, we took it for granted that such things would never happen in the Soviet Union. Once a Gog, always a Gog.

Then, two years later, came the miraculous Soviet Coup -- when every day seemed to bring more and more incredible news. One morning I woke to learn that Mikhail Gorbachev had quit the Communist Party during the night. Across the U.S.S.R., people were toppling statues of Lenin and waving the tri-color Russian flag. Now it was the Russians and Ukranians and Latvians and Lithuanians who were dancing in the streets!

I wanted to leap up and find a place to do some dancing myself.

The only parallel to that feeling in my experience was when the Cubs won the divisional championship in 1984. A happy compulsion forced me out the door and down Clark street to Wrigley Field, where I found about ten thousand other people had fallen victim to the same happy complusion. There was spontaneous celebration in the streets.

Suddenly, the urge was sweeping over me again. I couldn't exactly walk down to Red Square. But I had to find someplace to celebrate.

So I went to church.

We were out of town visiting relatives that weekend, and they were very keen us hearing their Sunday School teacher, who was doing a special series on her pet topic that quarter. Prophecy, as it turned out.

And so, on the morning of the end of Communism as we know it in the Soviet Union, when I had wanted to go dance in the street, I went instead to hear a Sunday School lesson about the End Times.

It was another case of smiling politely and inwardly doing something else. For, based on past experiences, I'd guessed we were about to be subjected to a beehived Church Lady with armloads of End Times charts and just enough knowledge of history and Scripture to be dangerous.

Unfortunately, my instinct was prophetic.

The classroom was in the basement of a new addition to the church. At one end was a podium, parked next to an overhead projector and screen. As the teacher appeared and fastened on her lapel microphone, the room of about fifty adult students grew quiet. After all, it had been one heck of a week. Everybody was obviously eager for an analysis of events from a future perspective.

Mrs. Walker wasted no time. "Does anybody REALLY know what happened in the Soviet Union this week?" she asked, with a knowing grin.

One lady near the front shared her view. "I don't trust 'em!" she said, with authority, and it was apparent that several people around her agreed. This was obviously one of several correct answers.

Another gentleman offered another. "We've been brought one step closer to the One World Government?"

"One World Government," intoned Mrs. Walker. "That's right."

"Nothing changed at all." There was a spontaneous intake of breath and then vigorous murmers of approval; somebody had finally articulated the gut-feelings of the entire group.

"Nothing changed at all," repeated Mrs. Walker. "Exactly. I was more comfortable Monday when the hard line communists came out of the closet than I was when the coup was overthrown and they said everything was all right."

The Sunday School teacher then expressed her disgust that some people would, no doubt, actually BELIEVE the Soviets this time and probably even send them material aid. Which would, of course, only serve to prop up the One World Government. "But no matter what changes have occured on the outside," she concluded, "we know from Scripture that Russia is the Great Power of the North that will invade Israel."

There would be no dancing in this church today.

Instead, Mrs. Walker's class found themselves trying to work through something akin to loss: their End Times scenario had been dealt a crippling blow -- the threatened democratization of Gog.

It takes a good deal of fortitude and discipline to roll with the changes of history as it sweeps from one end of time to the other. Most human beings eventually bog down somewhere along the way, clinging vainly to what they know, fearful of knowing anything more.

But one doesn't have to be much of a prophet to see that the end of Soviet Communism will no more bring on the Millenium than did the beginning. A perusal of all the possibilities for disaster in the new Soviet situation might well lead one to declare Planet Earth a lost cause after all.

Yet, we can also see -- without being too naively optimistic -- that the conclusion of the East/West stalemate also gives us cause for great hope. Perhaps all that money we've been spending on weapons will be put to use on better things. Maybe we'll be able to discuss global issues free from the clouding influence of hidden agendas and the Red Threat.

We might even be able to talk about the darker side of capitalism. If so, we could examine, among other things, the relation of the free market to the content and quality of Christian books. There seem to be certain inherent problems in causing an admitted "narrow way" to have "mass appeal" for masses who seem to prefer one opiate or another.

Like doing the End Times puzzle, for example.

Maybe somebody will figure out a way to steer people away from the tempting escape into trivia and get them instead to wrestle with the parodoxes of their faith: How to renounce the world and still live in it. How to enjoy art and culture or work to save the earth even though we know it's all going to burn. How to believe in the Second Coming and the end of time without choking the future to death.

For now, it seems, the rumors of Planet Earth's demise may have been somewhat premature. Facing such a possibility will require no small amount of fortitude and Perestroika on the part of those American Christians who have been waiting -- at least figuratively -- with bags packed upon the hilltops. Maybe if we can all stop looking so hard for the Rapture, we might be able to start looking for Jesus.

And the one place Jesus is always to be found is standing with those who suffer in the fires of tribulation. Many of us look forward to hearing from the leaders of the formerly-underground Soviet church. No doubt, we have much to learn from a perspective shaped and focused by seven decades of persecution. Hopefully, they won't be too disappointed when they meet us.

But let's not bother them with any of that yet. Not while people still want to wave flags and topple statues and dance. So, if you'll excuse me, I still have a little dancing to do myself. Anybody want to join me?