On the notion of being left behind

I began a reflection on those verses in Matthew 24 that talk about one of a couple being left and another being taken. A common enough worry among us - that the one we love will die before we do or that we'll die before them. How will we handle such an event. It is too big for us to imagine. Somehow, Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like this: that we don't know what will become of us or our loved ones. The question of being left behind is addressed by Jesus at the end of John's gospel, where Peter askes of the "beloved disciple" What about this guy? Jesus says basically, "whether he comes before or after you, what does that matter to you and me. You're following me - not him."
Knowing the popular mythology that has accreted onto this parable and especially how it induces emotional wrecks to respond to altar calls, I thought, let's take this in another direction.
I began with a joke.
Matthew 24:41x "Likewise there will be two virgins attending a feast/ one will be taken and the other .../ the other will be taken as well."
Which is a bit juvenile, as Jami points out to me. But I gamely continued.
Matthew 24:41y "In the same manner there will be two men sitting in a bar, after work, and they'll be eating hot wings with blue cheese drerssing, watching a sports call-in show - they'll drink several beers, some with high gravity, and laugh at increasingly odd jokes, and one will take home an extra order of wings and the other will leave behind a tip."
41y "In the same manner two hillbillies will go down a river with class 3 and 4 rapids, in a rubber raft, with a gallon of moonshine, their favorite coon hound, and a box of cherry bombs, on a night with a full mooon under a cloudless sky. And they will be thought to have taken leave of their senses by all they've left behind."
41 [symbol for pi] "In the same manner there will be an indeterminate number of people, men and women, engaged in a variety of activities, entertaining each other, teaching and learning, sharing the joys and struggles of life, in solitude and in crowds, family groups, freinds and strangers, all attempting to live good lives or to discover what the good life is, at once happy and dissatisfied, carried away in the moment or settled in contentment. And one or more will be taken in by artifacts left behind. And one or more others will leave behind artifiacts taken up for reasons no longer remembered. One or more of either group may be taken behind and left. One or more of either group might be behind, and though for a bit left, eventually taken up again. Of those in all groups and in the group of those conditionally excluded there might be behind those left or taken while some are taken from behind that others had left, through no fault of their own.
The key thing is this: it is difficult to say whether being taken or left is good or bad. It's like sometimes when there are mass layoffs, one guy is taken from the widget line and is retrained and gets a better job, while the guy left behind continues to make a steady salary - both are happy. Sometimes a kid, for instance in school, is left behind and blossoms - sometimes not. Results can be mixed. In both being taken and being left behind there are opportunities. The difficulty in being taken is a kind of resting on your laurels where you cease to learn and try and you just mail it in. Likewise the difficulty in being left behind is that you get depressed, you dwell too much on how others are passing you by, and you begin sabotaging the process.
I underscore this ambiguity here with this observation from my days as a wood worker. We would go among the trees and I remember my dad pointing to various ones: we would take a certain tree for a chair - even though it might be small, but the wood had the right spring to it. Others we'd leave behind, because they were more suited to a table or a plow that we knew we would be building later."