As soon as the meeting ended Steve headed back to Sodom and Gomorrah and looked everywhere for Lot so he could warn him about the change to the deadline. Because of the push to get people to leave, Lot and the family didn’t stop by the house for over a day. Steve knew they had to show up at some point so decided to wait at the house. He even started to pack everything into boxes in an attempt to be helpful while he waited for Lot to get home. By 9 PM the next evening, the house was packed except for people personal rooms and Steve was pacing outside the front door when Abigail arrived home.
“Nine hours!” was the first thing Steve said to Abigail.
“What do you mean?”
“They changed the deadline. It starts at 6 instead of noon. You need to be at least an hour out of town once the destruction starts.”
“So eight hours then, not nine? We need to start leaving by 5?”
“Yes. I mean at least by 5. It’s going to be an unholy mess one it starts so the sooner you can get on your way the better it would be for the whole family.”
Abigail started to cry, “It’s not right. What He’s doing is not right.”
“Work while you cry, what can I do to help?”
Abigail instructed to Steve to go get the donkeys out of the stable and harnessed up to the little cart they used to haul Lot’s paints and painting around town. The girls arrived while Steve was out, and in a tearful flurry Abigail explained that they had to leave that night, the end was coming first thing in the morning and they had to get their things packed. When Steve got back he began to help load up the cart. Two hours later, Lot showed up.
He was a little surprised to see four donkeys out front with two already packed full, and two tied to their cart, which was about half way full of boxes. As he walked in he noticed the front room was empty and Abigail and the girls were running around the house panic stricken and tear trails down their dust caked faces. Steve walked out of the kitchen, looked at Lot and with a sigh of relief said, “Thank God!” Steve explained the situation to Lot, “You have to be on the road and out of two in four hours, five if you think your asses and gallop for at least the first 30 minutes.”
“Hey now Steve. No need for that kind of language.”
Steve stared at Lot. Lot broke the silence and turned from Steve’s stare, “I know! I know! It’s just… it’s here and I failed!”
“If you are not out of two when the destruction hits then you will have failed, until then, get loading up the cart.”
They pushed for the next three hours getting the things they absolutely needed and then spent the last hour arguing about things they wanted to bring but didn’t really need.
Steve broke into the conversation, “You four grab your asses and get on the road. If I can save anything I will, but you have got to get going.”
Everyone nodded in agreement and headed out of the house. Steve warned them it would be best not to look back when the city was being destroyed, “Then the Lord unleashes his wrath upon a people, it is a horrific event. No human eye that has witnessed such an event, has ever fully recovered. So please just keep moving and do not look back.” And with that warning, Lot, Abigail, Annabelle, and Sally started to lead their donkeys out of town with haste in their step. After about an hour and a half of keep with that pace they, out of sheer exhaustion, stopped to catch their breath. By then they were a safe distance for the city so that they would not be consumed when the destruction started.
Once they had caught their breath, they had a little food and water to get their strength back up and began moving again. About ten minutes later they heard the first thunderclap and felt the earth shake. The destruction had begun. Everyone started to run away from the noise behind them. Lot yelled at everyone to not look back. To just keep moving away from what they were hearing. The girls began to shake as tears to soak their cheeks for a second time. Lot choked away the tears that were beginning to frame his eyes. He could cry later, for now he had to get his family to safety.
After ten minutes of running away from the city as fast and as best as they could, the ground shook with such force that all of them stumbled to the ground. As they all huddled around, crying and fearing for their own lives, covering their heads with their arms and shawls, Abigail came to an unshakeable realization. She hated the God she claimed to believe in and wanted others to know what this God had done to her, her friends, her home, and her family. She needed to share this epiphany before it went away. She knew that if it they did survive, the evil God of death that was destroying Sodom and Gomorrah was going to be given credit for letting them live and it would be a story told to others about what a good God it was that did this horrible thing. She would not want to give any more undeserved credit to a god she now knew in her heart was false.
“Lot.”
“Yes?”
“Is your god a just and fair god?”
Lot didn’t want to respond.
“We had a house of god didn’t we? I mean with all that we did in His name, and for His honor. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not wrong.”
“Why would your god destroy His own house? Why would your loving and accepting god murder so many unknowing and innocent people?”
“I don’t know Abby. I really don’t know.”
“Lot, your god is false.”
“Abby, don’t.”
“He is nothing like you said He was. He is evil. He is death. He is unjust, and He is a lie. If there is one thing that you have taught me it’s to never follow a lie.”
“Abby, it will be ok. We have each other now.”
“Look at what your god truly is. Look at your lie doing what He does best.”
“ABBY!”
She pushed herself away from Lot and stood up, staring into the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. As she watched burning sulfur rain down on her home, the stream of tears on her cheeks began to dry up from the heat that was being pushed across the landscape. She could see the burning bodies of people she had fed and loved, running and dropping lifeless as they continued to burn. She even thought she could hear the screams, even thought she was too far away for them to be real.
Lot had scrambled back to Abigail and pulled her back to the ground, but it was done. Lot began to scream. “No. No! NO! You’re ok. You didn’t see! Look at me Abby! LOOK AT ME!”
Abigail shifted her eyes from the images of horror burned into her now empty eyes and looked at Lot. She smiled and grabbed Lot’s hand and held it next to her face as Lot held his breath, not wanting it to interfere with what she was about to say, “We did more than your god could ever do. We actually saved people. We were the truth and Him. We were…”
The effect of seeing all she knew and loved being destroyed so violently had sent Abigail into a state of shock. That accompanied by the stress her heart was experiencing caused her heart to give out. Abigail’s stare slipped off Lot and hardened. She gently let go of Lot’s hand, and before her hand hit the ground, she was gone. Lot tightly wrapped his arms around her and as he rocked her back and forth, he kept whispering in her ear that everything was going to be fine, while kissing her forehead. He knew she was gone, but he could not bring himself to letting her go. It wasn’t until 10 hours later, long after the city was nothing but smoldering ash that Annabelle and Sally were able to get Lot to let Abigail go long enough to dig her grave. Once he and the girls finished filling the grave Lot offered one final prayer, not Pops, but to Abigail. He told the girls that their mother was right, and that they needed to leave the land forever, and he never prayed to, gave credit to, and talked about his god ever again.
The three of them rounded up the donkeys, and headed into the wilderness. With Lot’s new found realization that he believed his former god actually was, he was afraid to go to any civilized area. He did not want to risk destruction on any more people incase this vengeful god was to find him. So Lot set up camp in a cave, in the wilderness. However, it was about ten miles from a small village so that the girls could get supplies if needed. The loss of his love definitely took its toll on Lot. His no longer cared to make the world a better place. He just hid in a cave and tried to drink himself into permanent forgetfulness. He more he drank the less he could remember and that was where he now wanted to live.
It was after setting up their new home that both Annabelle and Sally realized that as a result of all their efforts to encourage people to leave town so they would be saved, both of them had contracted a case of pregnancy. Neither had any idea who the fathers were, let alone if they were alive or not, and based on the new introverted mannerisms of Lot, the girls were not sure how Lot would handle the news. They were afraid they might get in trouble and wanted to come up with some way to blame someone else. Since the only person they thought would get mad at them would be their father, they decided that if they could put the blame on him then they would not get in trouble for it. They did come up with a plan, and out of all the plans on the planet they could have come up with, there in a special place in insanity reserved for the plan they put in motion.
Annabelle and Sally went to town and picked up some nice bottles of wine and then cooked up a nice meal that night. They served very small portions and encouraged Lot drink and much as he could, and then to drink a little bit more. By the end of the evening Lot passed out in his bed. The first then undress to their under things and climbed in bed with Lot and fell asleep next to him. When he woke up, he noted that he was in bed with his daughters but chalked it up to it being a cold night and the girls missing their mother.
All the girls had to do at that point was wait until they began to show signs that they were pregnant. They now had a scapegoat to blame in the event that Lot attempted to yell at them. Three weeks later the girls approached Lot and told him they were pregnant. Dismayed at how this was even a possibility, he demanded to know how it could happen.
“Well dad, you remember that evening a few weeks back were we had that nice meal and wine?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well we all had a lot to drink that night.”
“And we all woke up in the same bed.” added Sally to what Annabelle was explaining. Both were looking up at Lot innocently.
And they left everything else up to Lot’s imagination to fill in the blank that was that evening. Lot opened his mouth a few times as if he was about to ask a question, and then closed it again. The girls plan to not get yelled at by their dad had worked. What they didn’t know is what this did to Lot inside. He had lost the only woman he had ever loved, and the only god that he loved and known, but now he had violated his role as a father to his children by unknowingly impregnating them in a fit of drunken wanting, which he did not even remember. Lot had lost… everything. He had nothing left to give to the world and knew he only had one thing that the world held that he could take. So the next morning he sent the girls to the village to get some supplies. While they were away he created one final painting of a dead tree on fire, with the titled, “A Lot of failure, life.” He attached a note telling the girls to find a land and a home to raise good families, adding, “You won’t be seeing your fath… me again, but if there is one thing I can leave you that you can trust me enough to keep with you the rest of your lives, stay away from the god and killed your dear mother. Good bye girls. I love you.” And he left, never to return.
After three days of continuous walking deeper and deeper into the wilderness he made his way up one of the highest mountains he could find. Once he reached the top he built an alter to himself. He then began to yell to the heavens, denouncing Pops and His teaching, His laws, and His existence. He did this for 15 straight hours. Pops even got a call about it, but by the time He showed up to see what was happening, there was already a collection of other gods listening to Lot yell about all of Pops failures as a god.
Feeling a little embarrassed about this Pops called for this trumpet crew to show up so He could go down to Lot and try to calm him down in hopes that it would get Lot to stop making any more of a scene. Then, while Pops was waiting for the crew to arrive, Lot, in his final act of belittlement towards his former god, yelled, “Heavens of the endless gods, I have followed you falsely and reject your existence. I solidify this proclamation I offer myself as an eternal offering to the truth I have learned about you all. You are the waste of worms in the dirt beneath my feet, save the god of Abram. You are even less than that. You are the waste of the beetles that eat the waste of these worms. You are nothing.”
The other gods looked at Pops and started laughing. Pops face flushed with color of embarrassed magenta, and Lot…. Lot splashed wine all over his body then climbed onto the burning alter. As Lot’s screams of pain pieced through the open sky, the other gods just stared in disbelief at Lot and then at Pops, and then back to Lot. Pops slowly started backing away from the entire scene. Something had clearly gone wrong, but He wasn’t 100% sure how this had happened. With all the other gods there, there was going to be a huge backlash of negative press. He needed to go get to the bottom of the story and get a disclaimer out expressing how He was in no way responsible for what had happened.
The true story of Lot is one of the more difficult stories I share, and from knowing what really happened you can understand why it was edited and rewritten to show the power of faith. On a happy note Lot and Abigail were able to meet up again. Because they had both denounced any form of deity before they died, they had no ties after they died, they only had each other. Once he learned that the girls had lied about him about how they got pregnant, he felt a lot better about the afterlife, and eventually admitted that it was probably the best thing they could have done for him. Lot’s and Abby’s anger lasted for quite some time after his death too, and they did their part to be a thorn it Pops side for well over a millennium. Any time Pops had a press conference for the next 1300 years, Lot and Abigail were there picketing and heckling every word Pops said.
What finally got them to stop after all that time? Pops finally consented to have a meeting with them about what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, after all the facts were placed before Pops, His ego was whittled down enough to admit to them that He was wrong for doing what He did, and apologized for what He had done. He even signed an affidavit stating that very thing. The joy Lot and Abigail felt from being able to prove their former god wrong and have Him apologize to their face was nirvana. They left Pop’s neighborhood of the universe and have never returned, but with what they were about to accomplished, they have become eternal celebrities.
