quote:At dusk, our automotive caravan makes a slow arc off the highway. Lavender light glints on our vehicles: the RVs, in the lead, followed by pick-ups hauling water containers, a series of four-doors like plastic take-out boxes, and at the rear, a reclaimed school bus. Horns blare at us for slowing the traffic that rockets through the corridor of strip malls and roadside scrub. Our congregation rolls in a slow spiral over the faded paint lines of the Walmart parking lot before coming to rest on the asphalt like an old-time wagon circle. Our prayers of thanks rise like incense.
The news of the Rapture's approach blessed us with a new focus. K105.5 FM "The Light" broadcast the End Date. With months to prepare, we followed the advice of the Elders on the radio. We withdrew the children from school. Second vehicles and flatscreen TVs went the way of the rummage sale. "Won't you come to church?" we exhorted our neighbors who came to pick through our belongings. Hurrying away with our Kitchen-Aid mixers, they received our pitying smiles. Only believers can perceive God's invisible spiritual warfare. Whatever we had been before -- teachers, waitresses, doctors -- the coming Rapture made us His soldiers.
The Elders needed our donations for billboards, t-shirts, and TV ads proclaiming the End Date. We cashed out any investments that placed faith in a future He hadn't ordained: mortgages, college funds, bank accounts. We sold our houses, and last of all, the church and the land it stood on. Uplifted by the Elders' constant prayers on the radio, we headed for the assembly point with joy and trembling. Even if our hearts ached for our hometowns, our faces shone with the conviction of being right with God.
When the radio station went dead at the appointed hour, we cried out in happiness. The message-bearers had been swept up already! Though we could not yet feel it, the Earth had begun splitting. We visualized a wind moving across the globe, drawing believers up to Heaven. Soon it would embrace us. For several minutes, we teetered in hope on the edge of a yawning silence.
Hours passed. People sank to their backsides on the ground. No one voiced the dominant question: What if God had come and found none of us worthy? Rumors of miscalculation circulated. A reprieve, someone said, to bring more unbelievers into the fold. But the broadcast did not return.
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