Being raised in a ultra-conservative Evangelical household, I feared the rapture like I feared the rapists and killers on Unsolved Mysteries that I encountered every time I got to stay up late at the cable television paradise known as my grandparents’ house. It’s more than a little ironic that the rapture was supposed to be everything I should have anticipated as a good Christian, but I found it annoying that if it did occur, it would rob me of the rest of my life. It says a lot that I wouldn’t want to miss out on a life consisting of things like looking forward to the Scholastic book fair or waiting all week long to watch TGIF until Uncle Jesse said “H-E-double hockey stick,” at which point my parents made me turn it off and go to bed.
That said, I felt that I had so much to live for before God popped down like a jack-in-a-box claw machine and plucked me into the foggy ether of heaven to make me play harps and sing with angels for, oh, only a billion forevers. It sounded about as appealing as a drum circle in the parking lot at a Dave Matthews concert. Anyway, I realized as a young child that if I was caught up into playing in the Everlasting Plastic Bucket Band, I was inevitably going to miss out on the greatest things this earthly life had to offer. More specifically, I would never be able to 1) play Major League Baseball, 2) have sex with a girl, 3) kiss a girl, and/or 4) talk to a girl. (Eighteen was a tough year.)
Church didn’t help my fear since a large mural in my Sunday School classroom had ghost-like wisps of people being caught up into the golden trumpeted clouds as chaos reigned below in the form of burning airplanes and highway car pile-ups (see above). My parents didn’t help my fear because my dad insisted on ending all sentences related to the future with the “if the Lord tarries” tagline (tarry means “wait.” I’m assuming nobody else knows this except Christians). Such as: “We can go to McDonald’s after we’re done shopping...if the Lord tarries.” And then I would just picture God as the Hamburglar, replacing my delicious french fries and cheap plastic toy down here with gross healthy foods like fruit up in “paradise.”
My parents kind of thought the world was going to end by the time I got to kindergarten, which may explain why I was allowed to ride without a seat belt in the back of a Plymouth Horizon whose door sometimes randomly opened while going around sharp turns. In any case, my kindergarten year was1987. In hindsight, it’s not that inconceivable that the world was going to end in the near future, seeing as if there was any decade to doubt the sanity of the human race, it was the 80’s. But then the 90’s came and people wore socks with Birkenstocks and we were still here. And then the 00’s came and the Red Sox actually won a World Series. Still here. And in the 10’s, I thought the most telling sign that the end might be near was when Susan Boyle sold like 10 million records in about a month. But apparently it takes a lot more than that, and even more than Rebecca Black becoming famous (if anyone forgets, she sang that song “Friday.” You can probably find it on YouTube).
And yet I’m still a little nervous.
Sometimes I’ll call three or four friends, as well as my parents’ house and nobody will pick up. And I picture all of them gone, off to have sex and hit walk-off home runs for all eternity while I’m left having to dodge falling stars and deal with rivers flowing with blood. I mean, in those situations, if someone gave me 1,000 to one odds on a dollar that they were taken into space, I would take it. Even though my money would be worthless cause a one world order would be instituted within the next year.
Exhibit two, just the other day I was at Kimi’s parents house and we were looking for them and they weren’t anywhere in the house (even though they were ten minutes earlier). Both their cars were in the driveway, and I promise there was an eerie silence hanging in the air as well. Most people’s natural reaction would be, “They’re probably outside.” Not me. Part of me was seriously thinking, “I’ve been left behind. I’m gonna find two piles of clothing, with no bodies. And we’re going to have to sell this house on a down market, not to mention that millions of other people will be gone, necessitating much less housing, so I’m even more screwed.” Turns out, they were outside. Crazy.
I don’t hold anything against my mom and dad, and they’re now a little more realistic about God’s plan for the human race, but it is a weird Pavlovian response for me to fear getting left behind by a God that I really do still love. At the same time, it’s kind of fun I guess. And I don’t know, maybe someday someone will be trying to call me and I’ll be the one who’s out of here. But really, I hope that when all this ends, God doesn’t just start picking people off, but that he brings wholeness and perfection to a pretty awesome world that’s already here.
And I’ll own Camden Yards and love Kimi well, literally forever.
