LBCF, No. 165: ‘Dear Captain’

Originally posted May 23, 2008.

Read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Diversity; fetus; transgender; vulnerable; entitlement; science-based; evidence-based. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available.

Left Behind, pp. 438-440

New Hope Village Church’s Sunday service is drawing SRO crowds.

Rayford and Chloe watched for Buck until the last minute the next morning, but they could no longer save a seat for him when the sanctuary and the balcony filled. When Bruce began his message, Chloe nudged her father and pointed out the window, down onto the walk before the front door. There, in a small crowd listening to an external speaker, was Buck. Rayford raised a celebratory fist and whispered to Chloe, “Wonder what you’re going to pray for this morning?”

(Out of sympathy for Chloe’s embarrassment, we’ll just ignore Rayford here and pretend that whole fist-pumping bit didn’t happen.)

Post-Event I would think every house of worship would be jammed with overflow crowds like this one. This is one of the things we humans do in the wake of tragedy — we gather together, often in churches. One baby trapped in a well will fill every pew in town for a week. The Event is a much bigger deal — imagine every baby and young child on the planet lost down that well.

A mere 13 days after The Event, the world would still be reeling from the trauma and the impulse to gather together and hold vigils would be overwhelming. People wouldn’t be able to hold vigils at the scene of The Event because it happened everywhere and nowhere. Churches would thus be the most likely place for such vigiling to occur — they’re easy to find, open to the public, and they’ve already got candles and experience conducting this sort of thing. Schools might be another gathering place* — somewhere people could leave notes at impromptu shrines piled high with flowers, candles and stuffed animals. But those empty schools might also be a bit too much, too overwhelming. All those stuffed animals mouldering in the rain — the last of the pre-Event plush manufactured before the stuffed-animal companies closed their doors on a world without children.

So even though most Americans don’t go to church on most Sundays, most would likely do so on the Sundays following The Event. Out of civil custom, if not religious conviction, they would have swarmed their local churches and thus, rather quickly, people would have begun to notice a pattern — an undeniable, unmistakable clustering of missing adults at many of these churches. Each of those churches would have their own versions of Bruce or Loretta, people who could tell them what had happened.

Every local paper would’ve soon been reporting this story, some reporting it as theory, but more than a few likely reporting it as fact, supported by the evidence that only certain adults of a particular kind seemed to be among the vanished. That evidence would make this explanation far more convincing than Nicolae’s official story about electromagnetic something or other.

The Rapture theory would thus have been old news long before Buck even started on his Global Weekly story. While Bruce was conducting secret meetings with his inner-core core-groups, Loretta would be appearing on Larry King Live, playing the in-case-of-rapture video for the entire country.**

None of that happens here in Left Behind, of course. All those other towns are filled with Other People and the authors don’t really care or wonder about Other People all that much. They imagine that New Hope Village Church is an exception — perhaps the only church drawing such crowds. But even the Other People filling New Hope’s sanctuary barely register in this story:

Bruce played the former pastor’s videotape, told his own story again, talked briefly about prophecy, invited people to receive Christ, and then opened the microphone for personal accounts. As had happened the previous two weeks, people streamed forward and stood in line until well after one in the afternoon, eager to tell how they had now, finally, trusted Christ.

Chloe told her father she had wanted to be first, as he had been, but by the time she made her way down front the last row of the balcony, she was one of the last.

That’s verbatim: “… she made her way down front the last row of the balcony.” And so is “the previous two weeks,” even though The Event happened 13 days ago, on a Monday night, and I’m pretty sure you can’t fit three Sundays into 13 days.

Perhaps this would be a good time to mention again that Jerry Jenkins runs a writing school, with a starting tuition of only $1,365. Their critique service is also available to non-students. For just $30, “a team of writing professionals” will “evaluate your work on the basis of five core issues: Proper language usage, Pacing, Presentation, Purpose and Persuasiveness of the content.” (In Jenkins’ defense, “Continuity” isn’t one of their five core issues.)

Chloe “told her story, including the sign she believed God had given her in the form of a friend who sat beside her on the flight home.”

These folks really know how to bury the lede. Chloe’s “sign” from God isn’t really all that compelling when compared to what everyone in the room witnessed firsthand 13 days ago. Worse than that is the way Bruce never seems to move beyond a basic I-told-you-so message about the Rapture. He told Buck this is the same theme he plans to preach every Sunday. If I were one of those Other People gathered at New Hope I wouldn’t be nearly as interested in this endless rehashing of prophecies fulfilled as I would be in prophecies yet to come. What happens next? Bruce knows, but he’s not telling. And the congregation knows he knows, but they’re not asking. This is deeply weird — particularly since part of what Bruce knows is that everyone in that room will be dead within six years, 11 months and 19 days, and most sooner than that.