Is there any refuge from the coming storm?

Surely the Lord's return is close.  How much worse can it get on this miserable planet before God gives the signal and the final countdown begins?  I hate to think it but unfortunately I suppose it could get much worse.  On the other hand we know the Tribulation period which is soon to follow His coming to get His Church is to be the worst possible time on Earth and it won't reach that level until then.  And at that point the Church is not to be present.  Whatever happens now we are all going through it, and it does look like a sort of foreshadowing of the events of the Tribulation as spelled out in Revelation, particularly Revelation 6.

Although in a sense all this is God's judgment on human sinfulness, it is not God's pure outpouring of wrath which defines the Great Tribulation just before the Lord's return to reign on the Earth.   I confess to having some confusion about how to think of the difference.   That is, all disasters are from God in judgment, yet the Day of the Lord or the Great Tribulation is to be the fullest form of it.  Maybe that's the best I can do with it.

Because I have unsaved family and friends I want something to intervene to change the tide of this current wave of evil to give them time to change their minds and come to Christ before the Rapture.  The thought of the misery that awaits them if they are not part of the Rapture is immensely sad.  I pray nevertheless that they will be saved during that time.  Many will die saved at least, and some others will live through the whole catastrophe after becoming believers.

I think it must be close but what if it isn't?   Barring a miracle through God's mercy I don't see how we can prevent what looks like the inevitable train wreck of civilization that has been picking up steam for decades.  The fallenness of this world is racing wildly to its own perfection of evil if it makes sense to put it that way.  I pray and search my imagination for any way to build at least some kind of refuge from it and keep coming up against a dead end.   I guess there's the off-the-grid retreat into wild country for some people, but a refuge for many is what seems unlikely.  Maybe someone with more imagination than I have will come up with a way.

If we are right at the door of the Rapture which itself is the door to the Great Tribulation perhaps such a refuge is also needed, a global refuge in that case but my imagination can't reach beyond the US at the moment.  States opening themselves to refugees, first from the political mess in this nation but then from the events of the last days as spelled out in Revelation.  Some will live through it, which is hard to imagine as you read through the horrors described in that book of the Bible, and God can certainly preserve whomever He chooses to preserve, but perhaps such a refuge would be part of that preservation strategy.

Saving the whole country seems impossible now, meaning a return to anything like what we thought of as normal life seems impossible.  The forces of evil are entrenched and large enough to have their way.    John MacArthur's sermons on the current situation have focused on the breakdown of the usual means of restraining evil in this fallen world, which he sees as four:  conscience, the family, the police and the Church.  Conscience has been undermined by decades of teaching in the universities that justifies the kind of violence we are seeing now;  the family has been directly attacked by the policies of the Left, from abortion to feminism and the undermining of authority;  the police are now directly under attack as the insanity of actually removing them is promoted as a solution to inequities.   And the Church has been so compromised by false doctrines and capitulation to worldliness there is too little of it left to exert itself as salt and light to the culture.  God COULD give us a great revival even now, but would He?