Rapture Practice

by Aaron Hartzler

  “And if she says that she can’t do the show without me, you won’t pull me out?” I ask. There’s no way that Miss Tyler will let him do this. I’m the best thing in the show and she knows it.

  “Yes,” Dad says, “in that case, we’ll figure out some other form of discipline.”

  “I have lines to review,” I say, and start digging my script out of my backpack.

  Dad stands in my room, Mom at the door, watching as I wipe at my face and sit down on the floor with my back against the bottom bunk of the stacked beds that I share with Josh. I stare at the yellow highlighted lines without reading them. I can’t even see the words.

  “We love you, son.”

  When Dad says these words, I want to throw the script at the wall.

  Instead, I do nothing. I stare at the page, and I wait in the silence until he moves into the hall with my mother, and I hear the creak in the hallway floor that lets me know they’ve made it to the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Let’s pray before we get there, and ask God to really use our ministry tonight,” Dad says.

  We’re driving to church on Sunday night through a Kansas City thunderstorm. Our pastor asked Dad to preach tonight, and I’ll be playing the piano for the whole family to sing. Dad likes for us to do the special music when he preaches, especially when he gives a sermon for parents about raising godly children. We’re sort of like a modern-day von Trapp family, only instead of tunes about tiny white flowers and going to bed, we sing songs about Jesus. We’re the example of the family you can have if you follow the instructions Dad gives on the overhead transparency.

  “Honey, you want to start us off?” Dad asks. Mom closes her eyes and bows her head in the front seat.

  “Dear Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this opportunity to be used by you in the lives of others. We pray that as Hubert speaks, and Aaron plays the piano, and the children and I sing, this will not be a performance for our glory but a ministry for your glory….”

  As Mom prays, I stare at the rain-slicked streets in the dark and think about the song I’ll be playing. We practiced as a family this afternoon in the family room. It’s a beautiful tune by a composer who lost an eye to cancer and now writes Christian musicals under the name Patch the Pirate. The song is all about giving your heart to Jesus while it’s still tender, and surrendering all your talents for God to use them as he sees fit. The problem is, I don’t want to surrender my talents to God. What if he makes me use them as a missionary or a Christian schoolteacher? That isn’t the life I want for myself.

  Mom wraps up her prayer. When she says “amen,” Dad encourages each of us to search our hearts and make sure that we’re “right with God.”

  “If there’s any unconfessed sin your life, God can’t hear your prayers,” he says. “Each of you take a few minutes and make sure that you’re a vessel of service that is fit for use by the Lord tonight.”

  The car is quiet except for the swish-swoosh of the windshield wipers. Dad goes to talk to Miss Tyler tomorrow. I think of the lies Mom and Dad know about now, and the ones they don’t know about yet, and my stomach turns. I always get a little nervous about playing the piano in church, but this feels worse. I don’t want to mess up. Will God help my fingers hit the correct keys if I confess my sin? Will he keep Dad from taking me out of the play?

  Silently, I try to pray. God, I’m sorry for lying to Dad. Tonight, I dedicate my talents to You. Please help me to hit all the right notes, and please, please let Miss Tyler convince Dad not to take me out of the play.

  Dad pulls into a spot in the church parking lot, and we make a dash through the rain to the front door.

  During the service the storm outside lets up, but the butterflies in my stomach do not. It is not uncommon for preachers to speak a great deal about God’s plan for you, but tonight Dad’s sermon has a catchy title: “Satan’s Plan for Your Life.”

  “If you’re already a Christian, the devil can’t murder your soul and bring you to hell with him for all of eternity,” Dad explains, “but he can murder your Christian testimony so that you can’t be of use by God here on earth.”

  Dad illustrates this point with a story about a friend of Mom’s when she was in high school. The young man’s name was Chris and he had turned his back on God and taken to a wild life of drugs, rock and roll, and hitchhiking. One evening, Chris had hitched a ride and tried to rob the driver, who shot him.

  “The emergency room doctor told Chris’s mother that the bullet only grazed him and that he shouldn’t have died from the wound,” Dad says. But Chris’s mother knew what had really happened. Two days later, Dad says, she stood in front of a congregation of sobbing high school students at Chris’s funeral and explained that Chris had strayed so far from God’s plan for his life that God allowed him to be killed. The Good Shepherd, she said, had called home his wayward lamb.

  “Surrender your will and your talents to the master’s plan for your life,” Dad says, quoting a verse from Philippians “and you, too, will know ‘the peace of God that passes all understanding.’ ”

  This story isn’t helping the butterflies in my stomach. I’ve heard it before, but now I wonder if it applies to me. Will God allow me to be killed in a freak accident if I keep lying to my parents about music and movies?

  As Dad wraps up his sermon, he says, “I’d like to call my family up to the front to sing a song about dedicating your heart and soul to the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Belinda and the children come to sing, I trust that if you haven’t already, you’ll consider telling the creator of heaven and earth that every part of you is dedicated to serving him.”

  When I reach the piano bench, I wipe my hands across my slacks and wait for Mom’s nod to begin the introduction to the song. I love playing the piano, because as soon as I start, everything else drops away—the butterflies vanish, the staccato fears pinging around my head quiet down, and I become lost in the notes and the rhythms. Mom’s light soprano wraps a beautiful obbligato harmony over the clear voices of Josh, Miriam, and Caleb, who sing the melody.

  As I play the final notes of the song, stillness settles over the congregation, a sort of holy hush, finally broken after several seconds by a chorus of hearty “amens”—what we do in church instead of clapping. My fingers found every note perfectly. Maybe God heard my prayer in the car. Maybe He’s not upset with me after all.

  After church, Erin finds me in the foyer and tells me I did a great job.

  “Thanks,” I say, and smile.

  We’re not dating anymore. When I told her what happened because of the CD, she decided we should go back to being friends.

  “You doing okay?” she asks. “When do you find out if you still get to do the play?”

  “Tomorrow.” I can’t stop staring at the sheen of pink gloss on her lips. I wish I’d tried to kiss her more when she was my girlfriend. Why didn’t I?

  “I’ll say a prayer,” she says.

  “Great. And just so we have all the bases covered, I’m going to cut myself and worship Baal.” I’m joking, but she doesn’t get it.

  “What?” She frowns, confused.

  “Never mind.” I smile and shake my head. “A little Old Testament humor.”

  “Oh!” She laughs, but it’s awkward. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “I will.”

  She turns to leave, then looks back over her shoulder. “I really like that CD,” she says. Then she pushes through the double doors and into the parking lot.

  “I talked to Miss Tyler, Aaron.”

  I am standing in my parents’ bedroom, waiting for the next sentence to come out of Dad’s mouth. The verdict. He and Mom have been here with the door closed since he returned a half hour ago. I could hear hushed voices from the hallway, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  My stomach is in knots and my shoulder blades are pulling into each other like penguins huddled together for warmth on an ice floe.

  C’mon, Miss Tyler, please… />
  I’ve been quietly chanting this all morning, sending a silent message to the drama classroom at my high school, hoping against hope that Miss Tyler will somehow be able to talk my father into an alternative—any alternative—to pulling me out of the play.

  I am somehow startled by the stuff that hangs on the walls of their bedroom, as if I am seeing them for the first time: lace doilies crocheted by Papa, a leaning goose I made from stained pine in sixth grade, groupings of plaques and needlepoint samplers of inspirational sayings and Bible verses, a sheaf of wheat tied with a ribbon, and, over Mom’s antique nightstand, a mirror framed inside an actual horse collar—the kind of black, rubbery harness with big metal rings on the sides that might have been slipped over a Clydesdale’s head and then hitched to a buggy a hundred years ago. It’s a very country, very homespun decorating style, very Early Baptist Bookstore.

  I hate it.

  I hate the way my stomach feels as I’m looking at it.

  I wonder where the horse collar came from. I think about how I saddled up the horses with Jason last summer at camp in Nebraska, and how exhilarating it was to ride at full gallop. I felt the same sense of sheer glee and power I did with the wind whipping through my hair as Jason and I raced along the rain-slicked Nebraska highway in his little red sports car, speeding back to camp with the music cranked up after we saw that first movie—high volume at a high speed.

  Dad’s voice snaps me back to this moment, my fate rushing toward me like a brick wall.

  “We talked for quite a while up at the school.”

  High speeds. High volumes. My heart is pounding, the blood racing through my ears with a roar only I can hear. I want to feel rain on my face, a ticket stub between my fingers, wind through my hair. I want be anywhere but here.

  “So, am I still in the play?”

  Even as I ask the question, I want to take the words back, pluck them out of the air, stuff them back down my own throat. I don’t want to know the answer, because I know the answer.

  “No, son, you’re not going to do the play.”

  Mom looks up at me, startled, and only then do I realize that I’m yelling the word “no” at the top of my lungs. I’ve always read in books about how people can’t breathe when something dreadful is happening—like they’re drowning and their lungs won’t work. Apparently, I don’t have that problem.

  “Dad, you can’t! You can’t do this.”

  “Son, I know you’re upset—”

  “You can’t punish the rest of the cast like this,” I cut him off. I’m desperate, and I don’t care about being disrespectful.

  “Aaron, lower your voice,” Mom says, her tone a flashing red light of warning.

  “How can you do this to me?” I yell, pressing the accelerator, gathering speed. “Nanny and Papa have already bought plane tickets. They’re coming for opening night!”

  “Aaron, I want you to realize that there are some consequences to sin that are worse than a spanking,” Dad says.

  “And you think this is going to make me want to obey you?” I floor it.

  “Aaron Hubert.” Mom uses my middle name, a full-on squad-car siren.

  “I know this hurts,” Dad says, “but you have to learn that you cannot lie and get away with it.”

  “It was a CD, Dad! If you weren’t so uptight about the music that we listen to, I wouldn’t have had to lie about it.”

  “Aaron, I have to cause a crisis in your life now so that you learn this lesson before it’s too late.” Dad’s voice is quiet, steady, grieved. “We don’t want to lose you to the world, son.”

  “Lose me? You don’t want to lose me?” I am blind with rage, plowing full speed ahead.

  “Aaron, we love you.” Dad’s quiet, slow voice. The freckled blue pickup truck is square in my headlights.

  “I HATE YOU.”

  The impact is deafening. The part of me so desperate for Dad’s approval is dead on arrival.

  “I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU.”

  No one has ever dared to say these words to my parents in our home before, much less shout them at a volume that surely the neighbors can hear. Yet in this moment, I’m unafraid. I don’t care. I’m not worried about the consequence. Shouting these words has changed me on the inside.

  I’m sobbing, and all I want to do is get away from this. I turn on my heel and walk down the hall to my bedroom away from their disappointment, their rules, their restrictions—away from them. I hear Mom and Dad calling after me, pleading, telling, begging, warning.

  I ignore them.

  What could they possibly take away now?

  Dad decided to take me out of the play the day before spring break. Rehearsals were already scheduled for each of the five days off from school, and now he drives me to the first one that week. He wants me to explain to the cast, to ask their forgiveness. “The only way to turn away from sin is to stand up and admit what you’ve done wrong,” he says, and then he prays with me in the parking lot and asks God to give me strength.

  Miss Tyler gathers everyone to the bleachers by the stage in the gym, and Dad calls the cast to attention. “Aaron has something he’d like to say to all of you.”

  My friend Dawn has a quizzical expression on her face. She sits in front of me in typing class and has big, beautiful eyes like a Disney princess. I can tell she knows something is up. As I stand there facing her and all of my other friends I still can’t believe this was happening.

  “I need to apologize to all of you,” I begin. Trying to force these words off my tongue is like trying to push a cat into a bathtub. I might be able to do it, but I will be torn and bleeding by the end. I soldier on. I explain about the CD and lying to my Dad about it, and how I can’t do the play as a result.

  Miss Tyler hugs me when I finish, and as I walk towards the door of the gym with my Dad, Dawn catches my eye with a small waive of her hand. She and everyone else sits wide-eyed, and uncomfortable on the bleachers, unsure of what has just happened, uncertain how the Pretty Woman soundtrack and my lie to my Dad is any of their concern.

  As I follow Dad to the car tears fill my eyes once more, but I am tired of crying, and angrily blink them away. How had I let him convince me this was about asking forgiveness of the cast? I don’t feel absolved, I feel ashamed, and ridiculous. It’s bad enough I don’t get to be in the play. Did he have to embarrass me in front of everyone, too?

  Daphne has tried her best to cheer me up, but it’s been hard to think about anything else for the past two weeks, and even harder to talk about. Not even Daphne has been able to make me laugh about this, and as the student body files into the gym to see the final dress rehearsal during sixth period, she sits down next to me at the end of a row of bleachers in the back.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I try to smile but I can’t. Even before the curtain opens, I know I won’t be able to watch what is about to occur.

  And I’m correct: The play is a disaster.

  Miss Tyler recast my role with a soft-spoken junior who is a nice guy, but not particularly great at comedy. He has no presence in the hallway between classes, let alone on stage. After he butchers the funniest line of the first scene, I slip off the bleachers and leave the gym. I walk down the hall to the music wing, close the door of a practice room, sit down at a glossy black lacquer piano, and cry.

  I have heard the phrase broken heart before, and I suppose I have been sad in the past, but I realize I have never understood what that phrase meant until now. I have never cried like this before. I want what I’m feeling to end, but it will not.

  I’m not even sure what the feelings are; it seems there are so many at once, roiling and rolling over one another. Anger, hurt, and the numbing boredom of sadness have paralyzed me during the past two weeks since Dad told me I wouldn’t be doing the play. I can’t laugh with Daphne. I can barely smile.

  I am exhausted from crying and worn out from these feelings—the gnawing anxiety of knowing this day would come, that I’d have to
watch this dress rehearsal with the entire high school and feel my humiliation and heartbreak all over again.

  My tears are splashing down onto the shiny white keys of the piano, and I lift my hands to wipe away the wet spots. As I do, my fingers find the keys, and the notes of a hymn arrangement I’ve known for years fill the practice room. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been practicing the piano a lot. When I’m at the keyboard, I drop into the music and everything else falls away. This is one of those songs I don’t have to think about; my fingers know it from memory, so I can put my hands on autopilot and be alone with my thoughts. It’s a beautiful, majestic arrangement, and I play it well. As my fingers float over the keys, the lyrics run through my head:

  When peace like a river attendeth my way

  When sorrows like sea billows roll

  Whatever my lot Thou has taught me to say

  “It is well, it is well with my soul.”

  Horatio Spafford wrote these words on the back of an envelope in 1873, while sailing to meet his wife in Europe after she had been rescued from a shipwreck that had claimed the lives of his four daughters. No one has died in my family, so why is the sadness I feel so profound? Why does my grief feel like I’ve lost more than a part in a play?

  Dad did more than teach me to act when I was a little boy; he entrusted me with his love of something. Acting is the thing he and I share, just like he shares basketball with Josh and Miriam. When I am up in front of a crowd at church or at school singing in a musical or acting in a play I feel his endless encouragement and approval. I see the pride that shines in his eyes. Dad knew this was the one thing he could do that would hurt me the most. He thinks this pain will somehow bring us closer together, but he’s taken away the thing I feel makes us a team. How can he not see this?

  This isn’t discipline. It’s betrayal.

  As I play the final arpeggio of the song, fresh tears begin to fall. I am so angry, and so hurt, and so tired of being angry and hurt. I want the pain to go away. I want all to be well with my soul. I’ve prayed a hundred times in the past few weeks, but I don’t know if God can hear me. I’ve begged for forgiveness, I’ve bargained and pleaded, but nothing changed the outcome. I’m still sitting in this practice room while some junior mangles my jokes onstage. In one last-ditch effort, I raise my eyes toward the ceiling.