Rapture Practice

by Aaron Hartzler

  But what am I good at, exactly?

  This is the question that nags at me as I sit in the dark next to Jason, staring into the low flames. The story of Speckles hasn’t changed since the first time I told it in Good News Club several years ago, but I have changed. Tonight as I looked into the eyes of the boys and girls watching me talk about flames and hell, I realized Speckles’s sacrifice isn’t beautiful.

  It’s horrible.

  I must’ve really scared the little kids around the campfire. If I’m afraid of hell, imagine how terrified they must be of it. Eternal torment and crucifixion are heavy issues to raise with first- and second-grade campers. That’s why I was trained to do it with an object lesson about a little boy, his pet hen, and the day she became an extra-crispy value meal in order to save her offspring.

  I know it’s dark enough that Jason probably can’t see the tears streaming down my face, but I keep staring into the fire just in case. I don’t really care if he sees me crying, but I am glad that if he’s noticed, he hasn’t said anything. If he asks me what’s wrong, I don’t think I can tell him.

  The truly sad part of the Speckles story—the part I realize now has always made me cry—isn’t her selfless act; that’s the basic instinct of an animal protecting its young. The heartbreak I feel is because we never find out what happens to Jimmy. All we know is that he loses the thing that is most precious to him in the whole world. From his perspective, the idea of atonement seems horrifying. It seems like the worst idea ever.

  I feel like everyone else is satisfied with the leap comparing Speckles to Jesus, but I’m not. A rope of fear tightens around my stomach—fear that His atonement doesn’t apply to me. I desperately want to feel the comfort of that psalm about being covered with big wings. There seems to be a promise of safety nestled in those feathers, or maybe it’s a promise of flight.

  As I stare into the fire, I say a silent prayer to that God with the big wings of protection: Help thou my unbelief.

  But it feels silly, like a spark from the popping logs that shoots into the darkened sky, then vanishes into nothingness.

  The air between Jason and me feels electric. I am sitting on a log at a campfire in the middle of the woods, next to a college student who is so much cooler than I am. I am crying, and he is pretending not to notice, and I think this may be the nicest thing any guy has ever done for me.

  I remember how last Friday night as we sped home from the State Theater it had started to rain, and Jason turned up the music. As Wilson Phillips sang about arrows through hearts drawn on a misty window, I held on to my little yellow ticket stub and felt like my life was finally beginning. I wasn’t the guy who is a whiz teaching Bible stories to kids, or who plays the piano in church, or who makes my dad proud.

  I was just myself.

  I’m not sure how long I can go on making my parents proud. For the past fifteen years, I’ve been to church three times a week and attended a Christian school Monday through Friday. I’ve learned enough to know the atonement Mom and Dad believe in is absolutely free for the taking, but that gleam of pride in their eyes comes with some strings attached. I have a hard time telling the difference between their love and their approval, and when my actions don’t live up to their standards, I feel like I’ve lost both.

  The choice that gnaws at my stomach isn’t between heaven and hell. I have a hunch that God isn’t disappointed with me, but my parents are a different story. I know in my head that Mom and Dad love me, but I can sense in my heart that I’m going to have to choose between their approval and making my own decisions—doing the things that feel right to me.

  I can’t find the words to tell Jason any of this. So we sit here in silence and watch the campfire shoot sparks into the sky until all that remains is a molten mound of glowing embers. I sneak a quick swipe at my face in the darkness and dry my cheeks with my hand. Then we stand up and head back to the covered wagons we call home.

  “We’ve got the next two nights without campers,” Jason says. “I was thinking maybe we could drive in to Grand Island for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Excellent,” I say, and smile. “That’d be really cool.” Jason’s car seats only two. It’ll just be us.

  “Want to do anything special?” he asks.

  I smile at him in the moonlight. “Let’s go see a movie.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Our waiter is tall and handsome, with dark hair. When he drops off my Diet Coke, I notice he’s wearing a silver ring on his left index finger. It’s a wide band brushed to a dull sheen. After he takes our order, Dad thanks him, then grasps Mom’s hand and addresses his four children.

  “Kids, we came to a nice restaurant today because it’s Aaron’s sixteenth birthday.” He turns to me, smiling like he does when I play the piano in church, his eyes shining with pride and affection. “Son, we want to consecrate your young adult life to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Olive Garden seemed like just the special place to do that.”

  “Oh, Aaron,” Mom gasps, “do you know what I was doing at this exact moment sixteen years ago today?”

  “Lamaze breathing?” I know it’s a rhetorical question, but I can’t resist. Mom can tell you where we were and what we ate for dinner on almost any random date for the last twenty years.

  “Oh, no, honey.” She laughs. “I was all finished with labor by this point. I was holding you in my arms and thanking God for my firstborn son.”

  “Aaron, you have grown into a good-looking young man,” Dad says, beaming, “and soon Satan will begin to shoot his fiery darts of sexual temptation your way.”

  As the words “sexual temptation” tumble from my father’s lips a little too loudly, our waiter appears. I see him freeze briefly, then recover and place a large bowl of salad and a basket of garlic bread sticks on the table as Dad continues.

  “Aaron, your mother and I have gotten you a very special birthday gift that will be a symbol of your commitment to physical purity.”

  I glance up, hoping that by some miracle the waiter has missed this comment, but he is looking right at me, and I feel my cheeks flush. I drop my gaze and try to distract myself with a sip from my straw, but my glass is already empty.

  “I’ll be right back with another refill for you,” the waiter says. He has bright, kind eyes. “Can I get you anything else?”

  I shake my head no, and he heads toward the kitchen.

  “Let’s pray and bless the food,” Dad says, “then Aaron can open his gift.”

  We all hold hands in a circle around the table, bow our heads, and close our eyes. Dad begins to pray in the middle of the Sunday afternoon Olive Garden lunch rush.

  “Lord, we want to thank you for this special time and for Aaron and what a fine young man he is growing up to be….”

  As Dad continues to talk to God over our bottomless basket of breadsticks, I can sense the eyes of the other diners in the restaurant staring at us. It always feels weird to hold hands and pray in public. As usual, that feeling is followed by a pang of guilt for feeling weird about it. As a Christian, this is one of the ways I can show my faith to the unsaved world. It is a simple, quiet act that speaks volumes: Our family believes in Jesus Christ. We pray over meals in restaurants.

  Usually, I keep my eyes closed and just pretend that if I can’t see the other people, they can’t see me, but today is different. I sense someone approach the table, and I open my eyes to see our waiter standing behind Dad with a fresh Diet Coke, waiting respectfully for us to finish praying. This time when our eyes meet, I don’t look away.

  Neither does he.

  I smile and shake my head. Can you believe this? I silently telegraph to him over my father’s bowed head. He winks at me and smiles.

  I don’t mind praying. I just wish we didn’t have to make such a big scene of it in public. Why can’t we pray in the car before we come into the restaurant? Usually, prayer is this thing we do in private—a personal conversation between us and God. Jesus even taught a parable about not praying
on the street corner like a Pharisee but showing you are repentant and humble by keeping your prayers out of sight. Restaurants require a prayer of the evangelical variety, it seems. Praying in restaurants is all about other people seeing us do it. It’s our faith on offense. One more way we can prove we’re not ashamed of Jesus; one more way to spread the Gospel; one more way to show we are different from the unsaved world, when all I really want right now is not to stand out.

  “… so we thank you for all of your blessings to us but most of all for the blood of your son, Jesus. And it’s in his name we pray, Amen.”

  Dad wraps up his prayer and the waiter delivers my Diet Coke. “Here you go.” He smiles. “I’ll be right back with your food.”

  I watch him walk away as Mom reaches into her purse and hands me a tiny, wrapped package. I am excited, but I’m not sure it’s the present. Something about the moment I shared with the waiter made me feel good, like an understanding had passed between us.

  I tear the paper from the present, and feel the flocked fabric of a small, velvet-covered box. I’m pretty sure I know what this is, and when I pop open the box, I am not surprised. Inside is an eighteen-karat gold signet ring etched with a large A in the kind of calligraphy I saw once in a picture of a Gutenberg Bible.

  “Wow,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Dad’s voice is husky with emotion. “Son, every time you’re alone with a young lady from now until the day you get married, this ring will be on your finger to remind you of your promise to the Lord Jesus Christ to remain morally and physically pure until your wedding night.”

  “Oh, darling!” Mom is smiling, her eyes bright with tears. “Think how happy you’ll be in the honeymoon suite on the night you’re married when you’ll be able to slip this ring off your finger and give it to your new bride—the best wedding gift of all: your virginity.”

  “Wait, let me get this straight.” Jason is laughing so hard there are tears running down his cheeks. “You’re supposed to give it to your wife when you get married? On your wedding night?”

  We are in the dinner line at the Bible college cafeteria. It’s Friday night, and I got permission from Mom and Dad to spend the night in Jason’s dorm room tonight. When I lifted my green melamine tray onto the rails along the hot-food line, he noticed the gold ring on my left hand.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s supposed to remind me not to do anything impure with girls.”

  Jason wipes his eyes, and nods. “Well… that’s cool, man. I mean, I guess that’s a good thing.”

  Conversations about sex always take this weird turn with Jason. He’s had sex, but he wasn’t supposed to, and somehow feels he has to encourage me not to do it before I’m married, either. Technically, he’s doing the right thing—the thing my parents would want him to do. The rules at the Bible college and my Christian high school are the same: If it comes out that you’ve been having sex, you get kicked out. Every once in a while somebody gets kicked out for getting pregnant, or getting someone pregnant. The message is always made clear: God will forgive these individuals if they repent, but they can never be virgins again. There’s a great sadness around the loss of virginity, the loss of a potential intimacy with one’s future spouse. As Dad says, “If you disobey God’s plan by not waiting for marriage, you’ll never know the special joys of only having been intimate with one other person.”

  The funny thing is, when I look at Jason, I want to be just like him. I don’t feel like it’s a sad thing that he’s not a virgin. I don’t think he does, either. I feel like he’s part of a cool club I’m not supposed to want to join. Of course, I’ve never even had the opportunity to join it. I’ve hardly even come close. I kissed a girl who was working in the camp kitchen while we were at Timberlake last summer, but only once, and that was the week that my parents showed up to take me home.

  I left camp last summer in a hurry. Right before the last two weeks, my parents arrived unannounced. They were concerned. I’d been too hard to get in touch with, and there were rumors I was running around with some college students of questionable integrity. I hadn’t saved a cent of the money I’d been earning, and they’d heard about the magnetic earrings Jason and I had worn back to camp one weekend.

  They didn’t ask me if I wanted to leave; they simply announced they were taking me home. So I packed my stuff and climbed into the car. It wasn’t up for discussion—just like the ring they gave me last week.

  The ring itself doesn’t bother me. It’s not like I’m getting lots of offers to rush out and have sex. Even if I was, I’m not certain I would want to. Still, there’s an annoying thought that buzzes my ears like a mosquito each time I glance down at my left ring finger. Whether or not I will wait to have sex until I am married was never up for discussion.

  There’s something I’ve heard countless times at church and my Christian school since I was a little boy: “God says it. I believe it. That settles it.” I know my feelings about issues like this don’t change the truth of God’s word—or Mom and Dad’s opinion about what’s best for me. I feel like I have no power, no control. I look around the cafeteria and realize none of these Bible college students is supposed to have sex before marriage, either. We’re all saving ourselves, and cheerful about it. As I look around the room, I can’t shake the feeling that I have no power over some very basic things. It feels like ankle-deep mud sucking at my sneakers. I’d probably agree I’m not ready to have sex yet, but it sure would be nice to be asked if I was.

  After we’re done eating in the cafeteria, Jason and I check movie times and drive to a theater across town from the Bible college. There’s a mall with a theater nearby, but we skip it. Jason isn’t supposed to go to movies, either, during the semester, and we don’t want to risk running into anybody we know headed to Banana Republic while we’re at the ticket window.

  Jason and I went to at least one movie every weekend last summer, and sometimes we’d see two or three. I’ve seen several more with him since we’ve been back from camp. I tell Mom and Dad we’re “going to the mall” or “hanging out at the college” and then we go to the theater. Each time I sneak around to see a movie, I feel less guilty about it. Mom would say this is because I’ve seared my conscience.

  “Aaron, once you quench God’s Holy Spirit by ignoring his still, small voice in your heart, it becomes easier and easier to ignore him and to sin in the future,” she told me once. “It’s like the scar tissue from a burn forms around your heart. Once you build up that layer of dead skin with no nerve endings, you can’t feel the heat, and you’ll hurt yourself again and again and not feel a thing.”

  As we drive to the theater, I know there’s no way we’ll get caught tonight, but I’m still a little scared. It makes me think about a sermon Dad preaches called “Teaching Children the Fear of the Lord,” where he quotes Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Dad says the word fear in the original Hebrew doesn’t mean “respect.” It means a healthy terror before an all-powerful God.

  As we park at the theater, I look down at my gold ring. Do I have a healthy terror of an all-powerful God? Not so much. I think I have a healthy terror of what my parents will do if they find out I’ve been sneaking around. I’ve decided God doesn’t care about my going to see a movie, but I know my parents do. I’m still nervous they’ll find out somehow, but the pull of Julia Roberts is no match for the knot of nerves in my stomach. She’s been my favorite actress since I saw her in Pretty Woman last summer. The movie tonight is a thriller, and she plays the wife of an abusive husband and fakes her own death to escape him.

  Jason and I speed back to the Bible college dorm and make it right on time for curfew. He does push-ups every night before he gets into bed, and tonight he insists that I join him.

  “Drop and give me fifty, Hartzler,” he barks with a grin. He’s wearing only his boxers, and his chest and arms are flushed from the set he’s just done.

  “Fifty? I’ll be lucky if I can do ten.”

  “Wel
l, you gotta start somewhere,” he says. “C’mon.” He shoves a pile of laundry out of the way and watches my form. I surprise us both and crank out twenty before I collapse.

  “Nice job, man! Let’s see.” Jason jerks his head toward the mirror where he’s flexing. I hesitate, then pull my shirt over my head. The very faintest of lines has appeared down the middle of my chest between my pecs. I’m still pretty skinny, but I can see the promise of some definition there, and smile.

  “Attaboy,” says Jason. “We’ll have you all ripped up in no time. The ladies won’t be able to keep their hands off you.”

  “That’s exactly what my dad is afraid of.”

  Jason laughs and starts taking out his contacts. I stand at the mirror and try to imagine a girl sliding her hands across my chest and gripping my arms. What would that feel like? Would girls really want to touch me? I glance at Jason’s back reflected in the mirror. He’s bent over the sink brushing his teeth. I can see why girls would want to touch Jason’s muscles. I steal one more glance at myself. I’m no He-Man, but I look okay, I decide. I should do push-ups more often.

  I slip my T-shirt back on and climb up on the top bunk while Jason settles onto the bottom. We talk for a long time about this girl Jason is going to ask out, and my parents, and how they’d freak if they knew we’d gone to a movie tonight.

  “Don’t worry, man. There’s no way they’ll find out,” he says. “Besides, what they don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”

  The trouble is, they believe it will hurt me. Jason drifts off to sleep, but I’m wide awake thinking about how a Julia Roberts movie could be bad for me. It isn’t that Mom and Dad are being strict for the sake of being strict. They’re afraid I’ll see people do things in movies and I’ll decide it’s okay for me to do those things, too. To them, it’s simple: black and white. They’ve made these rules to protect me.