Facebook comment, October 6, 2015
Hi Don... this post showed up in my Facebook news feed, and I thought I'd read your blog. I wanted to tell you that while I find it entirely believable that we may be on the edge of a great societal upheaval, I am dubious about it being necessarily the End Times. In part, because I have heard you and my other pastors give their congregations these same warnings, with almost identical phrases, for over 40 years. As a 12-year-old at Belmont Church, I was so completely convinced that the Seven Last Years would come at any moment, I did not believe that I would live to be an adult. Let that sink in - I was certain I would not live to be twenty. I had no hope for the future, beyond going to heaven when I was executed for being a Christian, if I was strong enough to not deny Christ. Which, after all, is what those Chick Tracts at Koinonia Bookstore told me would happen. I knew enough to know that we couldn't be certain when the rapture would take place, and so it was best to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
We were prepared to be right with God and prepared to die in the End Times because scriptural prophecies were all pointing to it happening soon... in the 70s. In the 80s. In the 90s. And now in the 21st Century. Our family looked into buying a farm way out in the country to hide away, and my mom read up on edible plants. And I tried day after day to find peace instead of fear that I would be tortured for being a Christian. Even now if I wake at 3 am, I will stay awake thinking about what I will do when our world begins to collapse. Will I literally run into the hills, taking nothing with me?
It's not that I disbelieve scripture in regards to the End Times. But I do question spiritual leaders saying that they KNOW something is about to happen. Because to this day I bear the trauma of fear and anxiety of believing I would not live to grow up, because you told me I wouldn't. Not to my face... not to me personally. But to the congregation of adults I sat within, and my parents who believed you too, and then reinforced those teachings at home. Now decades have passed, and it hasn't happened, and I have to wonder what value there is for us as Christians in being perpetually on high alert. Because all it served to do to me was make me terrified, and more focused on how I could achieve a godly death, rather than loving God and my neighbors and living out the Gospel.
You are, and always have been, a beloved spiritual leader to me. I will never cease to respect you. You married my parents, you led my dad's memorial service. But I can't help but wonder if I might have ended up leading a less fearful life if I hadn't been led to believe that I would die soon in the Tribulation.
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I don't remember when I first became conscious of the fascination our church had for the End Times/Tribulation/Second Coming/Seven Last Years/Rapture. The visual memory of my personal fear was contained in a Chick Tract from the stack the church had available beside the Christian comic books in the Koinonia Bookstore. I could read Spire Comics' "The Hiding Place" and "Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys," then follow it up with a Chick tract on the end times, which for maximum terror had a memorable picture of a man being taken in handcuffs to a portable guillotine on the back of a police motorcycle.
I remember my mom reading books on end times prophecy, and sharing the information with us. I remember sermons on The New Age Movement at church, which taught us that unicorns and rainbows, transcendental meditation, some guy called Lord Maitreya, and anything about Eastern religions were part of the beginning of the end. The Rapture was the hoped-for ticket out of the impending horror, but that wasn't a guarantee, since biblical prophecy wasn't entirely clear if it would come at the beginning, middle, or end of the seven years. Nor was it clear if all Christians would be included; it might just be 144,000 of the BEST Christians. I was fairly sure I wasn't one of them. I was terrified that I would break under torture and deny Christ, thereby guaranteeing that I would go to hell.
I remember one morning mom sharing a colorful dream she had with us; that all of us and other church friends were hanging by our fingers from the edge of a fiery pit, and one by one we were falling into the abyss. Apparently we were all scared in the dream as we fell one by one into the fire, but it was still a good thing because we would get special credit as martyrs.
I was around 10 years old.
Since we couldn't count on an early exit with the rapture from the coming hell on earth, my parents started thinking about making preparations to get us off the grid. One Saturday we and another family went out to look at a piece of property about an hour away, with the idea of making it into a farm and building houses. I'm not sure what kept us from following through with this; perhaps the fact that it was going to be an expensive and uncomfortable project. Instead, my mom got a book on edible plants, and I remember us going around the yard trying to identify some of them. I remember Queen Anne's Lace being mentioned as good when dipped in batter and deep-fried, although where we would be getting oil, flour and eggs to accomplish this when on the run from death squads was less clear.
When I turned 12, I remember doing the very basic math and coming to the conclusion that even if I managed to survive the entire seven years of tribulation, that I wouldn't live to be 20. The fact that my parents had kind of given up on making any sort of preparations (that I was aware of) didn't keep me from grieving that I wouldn't live to grow up. I wouldn't get to be married or have kids, I couldn't be certain that I would come out on the other side of it in heaven, and whenever I might manage to forget for a while the doom hanging over my head, there was sure to be the occasional sermon where our loving pastor Don would put down his Bible and depart from the sermon briefly to remind us that he was absolutely certain that the end times were coming in the next few years.
In my teen years, I would read the occasional religious novel about the Tribulation and try to mentally prepare myself for the worst, even though in retrospect there wasn't anything else going on in the world that indicated that my life was on a shortened trajectory. The End-Times sermons and prophecies slowly diminished, and my mom stopped reading books by Constance Cumbey. I graduated high school, and I half-heartedly applied to a couple of colleges and was accepted at the one that I could (fortunately) afford. I got my degree, and a job as a secretary on campus for a few years. It was about this time that I realized that I had in fact lived past 20, and I could see no likelihood that the end times were anywhere on the horizon. By this time I was going to Christ Presbyterian Church, where the pastor would carry on the proud religious tradition of occasionally stating with all spiritual and prophetic confidence that we were, in fact, in the End Times right now.
Fear of Tribulation never really left me, even if I stopped being actively afraid of the worst case scenario. When Y2K was on the horizon and everyone started wigging out that computers and power might go out everywhere, I fell into a severe depression that almost made me suicidal; this sort of disaster was always how the End Times started in fiction. I was lucky that I happened to share my fear with my tech guru brother-in-law, who said he'd done some investigating, and that the power grid would not be going down on December 31. In the years before and since, dreams of living rough and trying to hide would happen occasionally, and even now I am tempted to buy camping gear although I hate camping. But on a gut level I still wanted to be prepared, even though I finally came to believe that there would be no tribulation on earth.
About a decade ago, a friend of mine talked on a Facebook post about the dozens of surgeries he had endured since childhood (he had multiple birth defects) and how he wasn't supposed to live to grow up. And he mentioned the traumatic toll that knowledge can have on a life. I understood what he meant. Even now as a woman old enough to be a grandmother, I feel like I haven't really made many significant choices in my life, nor had any dreams I tried to accomplish. I can't remember having had any dreams for my life, beyond just wishing I lived with a different set of circumstances and a different personality. I never dated, never married, never had sex, never fell in love. I feel like I have lived a half-life; I have friends and a job I like and enough money to own a small place of my own and a car. I have hobbies. But my sisters both married and had children, as did my college friends, and so I look on to their lives, not with envy, but with shame that I have failed to live a complete life. Even though I don't feel that marriage and children would have necessarily suited me.
I can't blame my condition entirely on End-Times teaching. Both of my sisters got the same dosage of fear and prophecy as I did, yet it seems to have left them untouched. I suspect I am neurodivergent because I was always eccentric, (even though in my adulthood I learned how to hide it better) and that as a result I was more susceptible to coalescing all of this trauma into a burden that made a normal life difficult. But I do blame the church for not taking the hearts and minds of young children into account when teaching this sort of thing. I know I am not the only one to be traumatized by Tribulation teaching.
