#The rapture the beginning of the end series#

Here it was, proof that everyone around me was right.įiltered through pubescent narcissism and millenarian obsession, 9/11 took on spiritual proportions. And in all my panic, I also felt an undercurrent of relief. The attack didn’t happen to me either it took place in cities so distant I thought of them as other countries. I worried that my life on Earth would end before anything interesting ever happened to me. I was a 13-year-old girl, and I was alarmed.

But it was one thing to hear about the End-Times in church and quite another to stare them in the face. I turned on our small TV and watched a fireball take shape.Ĭhrist warned his disciples: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.” To be saved, as we were, was to face the future with equanimity. That’s how I heard that a plane had struck a World Trade Center tower. We had a radio, which my parents used, incongruously, to listen to NPR. Our television had three channels, no cable. In 2001, I was homeschooled, isolated at home with a younger brother and a variety of fundamentalist textbooks. Whatever the millennium brought, we were ready. We acted out the Book of Revelations with hand signs, the better to memorize its contents. In my youth group, we watched A Thief in the Night, which depicted the horrors awaiting those who would not be Raptured.

#The rapture the beginning of the end series#

The Left Behind series debuted in 1995, and I was absorbed by its account of the Tribulation, a violent period that, I’d been assured, God would spare me by virtue of my faith. I spent my childhood in the bosom of an Evangelical community in rural Virginia, eager and fearful, searching for signs of the apocalypse. For some, the 1990s were the end of history.