Rapture Practice

by Aaron Hartzler

  What if he isn’t one of the people God knows will get into heaven? What if he doesn’t understand about the Good News because he can’t?

  Mom begins today’s Bible story from the New Testament about Jesus calming the storm with the words “Peace! Be still!” The picture of Jesus she holds up is beautifully drawn. His eyes are kind, his hair whipped back by the storm, his arms outstretched, his handsome face set firm into the wind and rain.

  “Boys and girls,” Mom says, “Jesus can bring peace to each one of our hearts like he calmed the angry sea two thousand years ago.” She quotes Philippians: “ ‘And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’ ”

  I search for a peaceful place in my heart as she teaches, but all I can think about is Randy, dressed like a native from a tribe in the jungle, and my fear that he might be one of the people God knows won’t accept Jesus. For that matter, what if I’m one of those people? What if I’m not really saved?

  This idea sends a chill down my spine.

  I remember sitting on the couch between Mom and Dad when I was almost three years old and asking Jesus to come into my heart. Mom wrote down the words I prayed that day in the front of my little New Testament.

  How do I know that I meant it? How do I know that it worked?

  Dad says the way you know someone is truly born again is if his or her actions are Christ-like. If a person displays the fruit of the Spirit in his life: love, joy, peace, patience. There’s a whole list in Ephesians.

  I take a quick inventory as Mom wraps up the Bible story:

  I love my parents and my brothers and sister. I am kind to my friends. I help Mom teach Good News Club. On Sunday, I wore socks to church and submitted to my dad. But there are other things, too. Things Mom and Dad don’t know about, like the music I listen to late at night under the covers with my clock radio. I must be saved, because this is the Holy Spirit of God convicting me about listening to music my parents wouldn’t want me to. And the Holy Spirit only lives inside true believers. At least that’s what Dad says.

  I just wish I could know for sure.

  For the first time, as I look around Good News Club at all the kids watching Mom teach, I am not thrilled and excited about the Rapture. Instead, I feel a desperate sense of urgency about Jesus coming back.

  And something else:

  Dread.

  That night, no matter how hard I pray, I can still feel the fear in my stomach.

  Once I hear my brother’s breathing level out on the other side of the room, I slide my clock radio off the nightstand and into bed with me. I turn the volume knob all the way down, spread part of the sheet over the radio, and switch it on. The sheet protects my face from the warm, hard plastic as I press my ear directly over the speaker. I can barely hear the sounds of 88.5, KLJC, Kansas City’s home for “beautiful, sacred music.”

  This is the radio station operated by the Bible college where Dad teaches. The call letters KLJC stand for Knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. I turn the dial away from 88.5 until I hear the faint sounds of 98.1 KUDL.

  Dad teaches that the moral decline of society today started with rock music and something he calls the “counterculture of the fifties and sixties.”

  “Elvis ‘the Pelvis’ Presley and the Beatles came armed with the music of rebellion,” Dad says. “The emphasis of the rock drumbeat on the two and four count of every measure imitates sexual relations between a man and a woman. It’s the same noise that Moses heard when he came down Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments.”

  Dad considers any song with prominent drumbeats to be rock music, and frequently refers to this passage in Exodus when Moses finds the Israelites having a big celebration and worshipping a golden calf. Moses heard the music from this party and said, “The sound of war is in the camp.”

  Anytime we pass the music department at Walmart and Guns N’ Roses is blasting, Dad says, “The sound of war is in the camp.” This is why I keep the volume down and cover my radio with my ear to muffle the sound.

  When the dial reaches KUDL’s nightly “Kuddle Countdown,” Whitney Houston is singing about how children are the future. As I listen, my eyes fill with tears. I know what I’m doing is wrong, but something about her voice sounds like relief. It soothes the fear in my chest and the doubt in my stomach.

  Sometimes the singers on KUDL mention heaven, too, only it’s not far away in outer space. It’s a place you can visit right here on earth when you hold someone special in your arms. Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Taylor Dane, Chaka Khan, Richard Marx, and the guys from Chicago and REO Speedwagon all sing about love and longing with a choked sob in their throats. These are epic ballads with guitars and saxophones, a blazing key change in the middle, and a soaring high note at the end, songs that make me think of figure skaters spinning across the ice. I press my ear even closer to the speaker and imagine where the triple axels should go.

  As I listen, all my worries about the Rapture and whether Randy will get into heaven fall away. The someday Whitney sings about isn’t after we die—it’s when I grow up. These songs aren’t worried about eternity at all. They are focused on the here and now. I know this is one of the reasons Mom and Dad don’t want me to listen to this music.

  But I can’t help it. I’ve already heard this music, and I love it.

  After Whitney, Phil Collins sings a duet called “Separate Lives.” The man and woman in this song love each other but for some reason can’t be together. As I listen, hot tears of frustration fill my eyes and spill onto the sheet that covers the radio. I love my parents, but the things we want seem so different sometimes. I feel guilty, almost like I am betraying them, but instantly feel relieved that I feel guilty, because this must mean I’m saved. The Holy Spirit is doing his job to convict my heart of my sin, but I don’t turn the radio off.

  Instead, I decide to turn off my mind. I try to focus on the music, to let these melodies about love drown out the fear in my brain. Even this reminds me of a Bible verse: “Perfect love casts out fear.” Maybe perfect love songs cast out fear, too. I smile to myself as this thought crosses my mind. Here in the songs I’m not supposed to like is one more reminder of all the things Mom and Dad have taught me.

  I listen to the radio for a long time that night, until the plastic of the radio grows hot against my ear, and the music of KUDL sears a melody on my heart.

  Chad Paddle occupies the seat in front of me on the school bus, and when he sees the lights of the squad car out the back window, he calls to his mother at the wheel.

  “Mom! A cop is pulling you over!”

  We don’t call policemen “cops” at our house. Mom says it’s disrespectful.

  “They are officers of the Lord, who have the responsibility of keeping us safe,” she says. “They deserve our gratitude and respect.”

  Mrs. Paddle calls for all of us to be quiet, and a hush falls over the bus. She wasn’t driving too fast, that’s for sure. Sometimes it feels like it takes an hour to drive the two miles from the Christian school we attend to our street corner. I lean forward to hear what the policeman will say, and catch a flash of his hat and mirrored sunglasses as he peers in Mrs. Paddle’s front window.

  “Are you aware you’re driving down the street with your stop sign out?”

  “Oh! Oh, no, Officer, I was not. I am so sorry.” Mrs. Paddle is flustered.

  “Well, ma’am, you’re causin’ a little confusion among the motorists who are following you. If you could be a little more mindful of that, we’d all appreciate it.”

  Causing a little confusion. The cop’s understatement makes me giggle, and as the sound of my own laughter rings in my ears, I know I’ve made a mistake.

  “Are you a girl?”

  Chad Paddle narrows his eyes and peers at me through his glasses. He’s the only boy in school who has more freckles than I do. I feel my cheeks sting and my stomach turn. I hate it when this happens.

  The expressive vocal inflection
s that Dad says make me a good actor also apparently make my voice sound like a girl’s. I can’t hear it in my head when I’m talking, but I’m always shocked by any recording of my own voice. Mom says my voice will change soon, and telemarketers will no longer assume I’m “the woman of the house” when I answer the phone.

  “No,” I say quietly to Chad, “I’m not a girl.”

  I sit back in my seat, and stare down at my backpack to avoid eye contact.

  “ ’Cause you sure sound like a girl,” Chad says. The mocking tone in his voice makes me want to crawl under my seat. I wish he’d turn around, but I’m trapped.

  “And you have big girl lips.”

  I’ve heard this before, too. I’m not sure why it’s so bad to have full lips. I’m not sure why it’s so bad to be compared to a girl. Why is that a put-down? I like girls. I like to talk to them and hang around them at recess. We play four-square a lot while the other boys are playing kickball and basketball. I don’t understand what’s so bad about having qualities that some girls have.

  But it is. I know it is. It feels like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

  Chad makes up a song about how I’m a girl, and as he sings, I look around to see if anyone is listening. Most of the other kids are in their own conversations. My sister, Miriam, is up front with her friend Kelly. Josh is in the back with Kelly’s brother, Kevin. No one to hear.

  Or to help.

  Finally, the bus pulls up to our corner, and I cross the lawn and go into the house with Josh and Miriam. The smell of wet paint tickles my nose at the front door and draws me downstairs. I hear music coming from the laundry room, where I find Mom holding a wet roller and listening to KLJC.

  Mom loves the laundry room. When people ask her if she has a job, she always replies with a smile and a twinkle in her eye. “Yes, I do. I work around the clock at home as a domestic engineer. I am a wife and mother, and my family is my full-time job.”

  Mom quit college in her senior year to have me, and she doesn’t regret it.

  “The work I do in the kitchen and the laundry room is the ministry the Lord has called me to. Even matching socks is very important,” she says. “As I fold each pair, I pray for the little feet that go into those socks.”

  Today, the work Mom is doing in the laundry room does not involve laundry. She’s painting the gray cinder blocks on the wall behind the washer and dryer a startling shade of white, almost shocking in its brightness beneath the fluorescent lights. When I ask her why, she fixes me with a knowing gaze and quotes a Bible verse.

  “Aaron, ‘Men love darkness better than light because their deeds are evil.’ ” She turns and rolls a wide swath of pure white across the dingy gray.

  It’s the way Mom quotes that verse—the tone in her voice. I know something is wrong. She reaches over and turns down the clock radio she’s listening to. It’s my clock radio, and it hits me in a flash: we aren’t talking about the random evil deeds of generic men in unspecified darkness. We are talking about my evil deeds in my dark bedroom.

  “Aaron, I went and got your radio this morning so I could listen to some music down here while I painted, and when I plugged it in, it wasn’t tuned to KLJC.”

  My stomach sinks. I’d forgotten to tune the dial back from KUDL when I fell asleep last night.

  “Before I started painting, I was folding your socks,” Mom says, “and as I folded your socks I prayed, ‘Oh, Heavenly Father, help my precious Aaron to have feet that run after righteousness.’ Then I went upstairs and found your radio tuned to a rock-and-roll station.”

  There is paint on her fingers and pain in her voice. She wipes her hands on a rag.

  “My precious son, who are your feet running after?”

  The answer is simple: Peter Cetera.

  I know there is no way to explain this to Mom. How can I tell her that 98.1 KUDL isn’t a rock-and-roll station? How do I explain the difference between rock music and “adult contemporary”? Peter Cetera is burning up the charts lately with a duet called “The Next Time I Fall.” His partner on this track is a singer named Amy Grant.

  Even though she’s a Christian singer, they don’t play Amy Grant’s music on KLJC anymore. I read all about her in the manila folder I discovered in Dad’s file drawer. It is full of articles photocopied from magazines with parts highlighted, and notes about how ungodly Amy Grant is. She told Good Housekeeping about a time when she and a friend went to a topless beach, and in another interview she admitted she loves having a glass of red wine in a warm bath on her ranch outside Nashville. There were lots of other things highlighted, too, about her plunging necklines and penchant for leopard print.

  When I asked Dad about it, he explained that if Amy Grant really was a Christian, she wasn’t showing the fruits of the Spirit. She was allowing Satan to ruin her testimony for the Lord Jesus.

  “Amy Grant isn’t purposefully different from the world,” he said. “She wants her music to sound like rock music. Plus, she drinks and does things that aren’t a good example of Christ-like behavior.”

  The clock radio has little white paint spatters on it—spray from the roller.

  “Do your feet run after righteousness, Aaron?” There are tears in Mom’s eyes. “I called your dad at his office and told him you’d been listening to rock music. He is so grieved. It was like somebody had died.”

  When Dad comes home, he and Mom call me into their bedroom. Dad doesn’t spank me. Mom doesn’t take away my clock radio. They simply ask a question:

  “Why?”

  I am no match for the disappointment in their eyes, and my own fill up with tears. What can I say to make this better? These are the people spending their lives trying to bring me up according to all the commands in God’s word. They follow all the rules Dad teaches other parents. Now I’m the kid who is proving to be the exception to their rules. They’ve done everything right—so why am I already straying from the path?

  Dad has an answer for me, one I’ve heard before. “Rebellion.”

  He brings up Lucifer again, and how God kicked him out of heaven for deciding to make his own decisions. As he talks, I feel anger beneath my guilt.

  There are tears in Mom’s eyes. “Aaron, the only thing I want in the whole world is for my children to love Jesus, to be used mightily by God.”

  Dad nods. “Son, God’s word says that when there is unconfessed sin in your heart, God can’t hear your prayers. Let’s pray together and confess your sin of deceit and disobedience to the Lord. Ask his forgiveness so that you can be a clean vessel he can use again.”

  I can’t bear to see this hurt in their eyes. I want this to end. I nod, and bow my head. “Dear Heavenly Father, I’m sorry for disobeying Mom and Dad and listening to rock music. Please forgive me and help me not to be deceitful.”

  As I pray, I make sure to use the right vocal inflection, to give the right gravity to the words, to talk slowly and humbly. I try to sound truly sorry, but now I’m lying again.

  I don’t want to disobey Mom and Dad, but the truth is, I don’t think what I did was wrong. As as much as they believe this music is rebellious, I don’t. That’s the funny thing about belief: no one else can do it for you. Turns out, no matter how much I want to, I can’t make myself believe something I don’t. It’s not that I want to lie; I don’t feel that I have a choice. I know I will always love songs like this. They don’t make me feel separated from God. These songs make me feel at peace inside, the way I’ve always been told the presence of God will feel.

  “Next Time I Fall” is a song about being better at love, about trying again when you get it wrong. It doesn’t sound like the music of witchcraft or rebellion. It sounds like the opposite of war in the camp. It sounds like peace on earth.

  When I finish praying, Dad starts. “Father, we love Aaron so much. Please give him a heart for you, Lord. Help him stand strong against the temptation of Satan, so you can use him to build your kingdom. Help Aaron see how much we love him….”

  Mom and Da
d make these rules because they love me, but this doesn’t feel like love. This is where I get confused. I know in my head they love me no matter what, but the look in their eyes, the desperation in their voices, the tears streaming down Mom’s cheeks—all I can feel is their disapproval.

  Dad loves to quote a verse in Hebrews that says how God is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” My parents believe right and wrong are absolute, and I will never convince them otherwise. I know I will never change their minds about this music. I will never be able to share with them how it speaks to my soul, how it makes everything inside me feel a little bit better.

  While Dad prays for me I know I am stuck. I can’t stop listening to these songs, but I can’t bear to feel my parents’ disappointment, either. Will I always have to choose between the two? The fear wells up in my chest as the doubt creeps into my stomach. I open my eyes and glance down at the clock radio.

  So much trouble over a song…

  I get lost for a moment in the memory of Peter Cetera and Amy Grant singing in my head about doing better next time. The tune grows louder until it drowns out Dad’s voice and Mom’s tears, and suddenly I realize this song that is the problem holds the answer.

  Next time, I’ll know better what to do.

  I did it wrong this time. I got caught. Next time I won’t let that happen. Next time I’ll change the station back. I’ll be sure I don’t slip up. No more driving down the road with my stop sign out. No more confusion. From now on, I’ll take extra care to be the son they need me to be.

  At least while they’re watching.

  I can’t change what I like, but I can do a better job of loving them—of protecting them.

  When Dad finally says “amen,” he and Mom hug me for a long time. Then I climb the stairs to my room with my clock radio and a new resolve.

  CHAPTER 6

  “What are those pictures of the chicken on your bunk?” Jason asks. I’m fifteen years old, and we’ve just gotten out of the showers at the bathhouse near our campsite. He’s shaving while I put gel in my hair.