The Rapture - May 21, 2011

May 12:  There was a report on NPR’s All Things Considered as I was driving from my client to my teaching gig.  It was about The Rapture which many believe is supposed to happen on May 21st just nine short days from now.  What is The Rapture?  This is when God comes down and takes the true believers, the faithful, up to heaven.  Everyone left behind is basically in deep trouble.  They shall suffer though the end of the earth.

There have been a a popular series of Christian novels written about this.  Left Behind is a series of sixteen novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  There is way more dogma surrounding this than I would ever want to get into here.  This is supposedly all outlined in The Bible in the books of Ezekial, Isiah, Thesalonians, and, most certainly, Revelations.  To understand just how little I understand consider the folliowing lines from Wikipedia

Left Behind is a series of 16 best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, dealing with Christian dispensationalist End Times: pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological viewpoint of the end of the world.

Really?  Dispensationalist?  Pretribulation?  Premillenial?  Eschatologica?  And the end of the world?  I do not know what these words mean. I suppose I should have read these novels.  I also suppose, given that these words sound so very confusing to me, that I will be amongst those left behind.  I do not think I can do much in the next nine days to make a difference.  If I were to valiantly try to make amends or changes, I would have to assume an all knowing and all powerful God would have to know I was just doing it to save my soul.  Plus, again given my confusion by the worlds used, I would probably not know what to change or how much to change.   

I remember the Harmonic Convergence event of the 1980s.  There was even more hoopla (hoopla then is what we call buzz these days) about that then there seems to be for this weekends end of times. I remember the 2012 Mayan End of the world which have been “recalculated.”  The NPR piece talked about other ends of the world that clearly did not happen.  I guess I am of the belief, well at least the hope, that this one will pass uneventfully.  

May 19:  It is my sister Laura’s birthday today.  She would have been 53 years old today.  She passed away in 2002.  My sisters Nancy and Ani, my cousin David, and my mother always exchange emails this day and share spiritual feelings   

Amid thinking about my sister and how fast time has gone since she passed, I was reminded again by Yahoo News about the coming rapture on May 21st.  We will actually be in DC to celebrate my son Aram’s thirtieth birthday.  His birthday is actually on Monday but we will celebrate it on Saturday and Sunday.  If the rapture were to happen on the 21st as some are predicting it will certainly be a memorable birthday for my son and all how made the trek to celebrate it with him.  

In theory, we could start the festivities with the ten of so people and end up with some number less then that.  The pious and true believers in our little group might not be there for the birthday cake and the opening of the gifts.

Other than the crazy scariness of being “left behind” and thus somewhat damned, there are other questions that have come to mind:

1. I have to get some specific things done for my client in preparation for a meeting on Monday.  This will require taking my laptop and spending sometime working over this weekend.  If the rapture occurs, will the meeting be cancelled?  Should I not waste my time preparing now for something that won’t even matter in a few days?
2. At the birthday dinner, should I order obscenely expensive champagne and cognacs?  I mean if apocalyptic events unfold during dinner I might not even get the bill.  If I get the bill and were left behind, I wouldn’t care much about paying a credit card bill.  A bad credit score would be the least of my worries.

Both of these questions presuppose that I would be among the “left behind.”  Just because I am asking this inane borderline sacrilegious questions mean that I may not make the pure of heart cut.  I have doubts about my own worth and value in this regard.  I attribute it to being human and a combination of jerk and asshole... at times.  The people quoted in the various articles about this May 21st rapture thing are all 100% that this is going to happen and they will be going to heaven.  I just wonder how they can be so sure about either?

OK, it is clear that I am not taking this seriously.  Part of me must be a little concerned or I would be even more scathing and facetious in my words here.  Yet, if I were to guess and mind you it is only a guess, nothing will happen.  I want to hear what those so sure this was going to happen will have to say come Sunday morning.  I suppose they will go back to the algorithms they used in their calculations, make some changes, and come back with another date some time in the next few months or years.