He looked at her and asked angrily, “If Jesus Christ wants peace on earth, why doesn’t He just make peace? I don’t get it. I thought angels were supposed to be good guys. Why do they have to kill all these people?”

“Carl,” she replied, “you know I’m not religious either. For sure, I don’t have the answers. But here’s what I remember. People like you and me ignore God until we come to a crisis in our lives. Aunt Jo said that God might give the human race as much as two thousand years to accept His love voluntarily. But after that, God was going to bring things to an end, in two ways. First, the Christians would be given a short time to tell everybody in the world about God’s love. That would be like a big revival, I suppose. When they finished doing that, God was going to send some kind of terrible punishment on the rest of the people because of the way they had been living. Everybody would be given a chance to believe in Jesus, but not everybody would listen. Look, we know that’s true. Some people have been too busy making money and doing other things with their lives—people like us.”

Carl looked at her in amazement. “Lori, in all the years we’ve been together, you’ve never said one word about all this stuff to me. If you believe it so much, how come you never mentioned it until now?”

“Until today,” she said, “it never exactly came up. Anyway, I thought most of it was a fairy tale. Aunt Josephine was . . . well, she was one of those evangelical Christians. Mother always said she was a little weird. Anyway, she died a couple of years ago. But, Carl, before she died, Aunt Jo told me that she was praying—for you and me. . . .”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m saying that those prayers may have gotten us on this airplane.”

They both fell silent for several minutes, lost in thought.

Carl felt another shiver run down his spine. He had never been a particular believer in God, but he and Lori were alive, and millions of other people were in immediate danger. Why? He reached across and took Lori’s hands in his. “I don’t know anything about all this, but after all we’ve been through today, I do want to find out.”

One of the things Lori loved about her husband was that he was incredibly inquisitive. She was grateful that he hadn’t dismissed her aunt as some sort of religious lunatic, that he was keeping an open mind. She gave Carl’s hands a squeeze. “We’ll find out together,” she said softly.

They leaned back in their leather seats and tried to relax for a few moments. But before either of them could relax completely, the pilot came back on the public address system: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we are beginning our descent into the Albuquerque International Airport. Barring any unforeseen delays, we should be on the ground in about twenty minutes. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened.