My walk home from school took me down a long alleyway that cut through our suburban neighborhood. I always started off walking with a few friends but, by the time I turned the corner onto our quiet street, I was alone. Invariably, I looked up and down the street; often I saw no one: no cars, no people, no movement in any of the houses. Many of these days, the same thought flashed through my head, “The “rapture” has taken place and I’ve been ‘left behind.’”
When I was six, my mom explained that, when I died I would go to a place called hell, where I would burn in a fire for all eternity. Burn and burn but never die.
But there was a simple way out of this torture: “You need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” If I were to make that decision,” Mom explained, “You might even be raptured up to heaven with the rest of the family.”
My dad preached sermon after sermon about the rapture. Even when not at church, my thoughts orbited around the RAPTURE: the doctrine that Christ will someday return to swoop all believers into a wondrous golden city called the New Jerusalem (described by some, including my father, as a great pyramid that orbits the earth). My parents understood that all signs pointed to the fact that the rapture was right around the corner. It could happen any day!
“Two men walking up a hill,
One disappears and one’s left standing still.
I wish we’d all been ready.
There’s no time to change your mind,
The son has come and you’ve been left behind.”
We sang this chorus regularly. To this day, the lyrics are etched into my brain.
At seven, all talk of the rapture terrified me.
Day after day, I sprinted home from the exit of the alley, half-expecting to find that Mom had vanished—that our home would be empty—that I would be forced to find a way to survive by myself during the predicted “tribulation”.
Each day, I would burst through the front door and… Mom was there to greet me!
Day after day, the rapture had not yet taken place. Eventually my dad seemed to lose interest in it and his sermons veered to topics of more earthly importance.