The Beast, it beckons me, lulling me into the past I've tried hard to repress. I spent night after night, dreading the end of the world; a horrendous conclusion, and a more unbearable afterlife. Then two summers before the millennium, on a trip to Spokane, I had a nervous breakdown. Throughout my childhood I had convinced myself that the apocalypse would have to happen before or during the year 2000. I lay in the bed of a truck, looking up at the stars with my cousin, trying to imagine how the end of the world could happen in a year and a half. It started a period of various anxiety disorders and ulcers lasting into the onset of college. And into my college years of reoccurring dreams of the end of the world, Lucifer, and my dissent into hell. The apocalypse carried out in ways I would have never guessed.
When my parents would tuck my sister and I into bed at night, they would routinely remind us that the world was coming to an end and it could happen at anytime. Therefore, we were encouraged to have our hearts right with God or we would miss being raptured, and risk spending the afterlife in eternal hellfire. Not only did our parents sustain this persistent fear, it was a constant reminder in every sermon in church on Sunday. The four horseman of the apocalypse had mounted, bringing horror and chaos on a breakneck pace towards certain doom. One only had to turn on the television (even though we didn't have cable) to see the magnitude of sin happening in the world. War, famine, rampant homosexuality, terrorism, chaos all around, networking every sin and temptation through the medium of TV. The end is near.
A funny thing happened to me one day. I find it indicative of my abnormal upbringing. I was in the fifth grade and our family attended a church that resembled a cult. The church had a jovial, ironic name- New Hope, a born again oriented congregation. Around this time, there was a certain doomsayer in the universal Christian community that had prophesized the rapture would happen on this specific day. My parents sort of blew him off as some quack, but I was a little apprehensive about the day regardless. So I was on my way home from the bus stop after school, just like any other day. Except that I couldn't find my sister. I didn't really think much of it, until I got home and found that the doors were locked and my house was vacant. The only thing that I could think was that the rapture did indeed come and I didn't make it. I panicked and ran to my aunt's house, but she was nowhere to be found either. I felt utterly alone. After being unable to locate family members or any life at church, I headed towards my pastor's house, two miles from home. Coincidently our pastor's house was vacant as well. I walked the streets, terrified and dejected. Eventually someone I knew picked me up on the side of the road and took me home. Everyone laughed at my excursion, but I ended up being traumatized for days. There was no rapture. Only coincidence and God's good humor.
This story parallels other childhood stories. My sister and I still rehash these themes over and over when I visit, unable to come to any tangible conclusions. Only that we both believe that the mindset imposed on us at such a young age has impaired our ambitions, conditioning us to not hold any stock in our futures. Eventually our family couldn't maintain the strict and militant regiment of the born-again Christian lifestyle and quit the church. Unfortunately things were too deep seeded in me to really escape this mindset. Knowing that my sister feels the same way brings some solace. I've talked to other people with similar upbringings, and similar conclusions are formed. We cannot fully grasp the concept of a future. But who can, really?