CHAPTER 11

Rayford was glad he could take Chloe out for a drive Saturday after having been cooped up with their grief. He was glad she had agreed to accompany him to the church.

Chloe had been sleepy and quiet all day. She had mentioned the idea of dropping out of the university for a semester and taking some Internet classes. Rayford liked it. He was thinking of her. Then he realized she was thinking of him, and he was touched.

As they chatted on the short drive, he reminded her that after their day trip to Atlanta Monday they would have to drive home separately from O’Hare so he could get his car back. She smiled at him. “I think I can handle that, now that I’m twenty.”

“I do treat you like a little girl sometimes, don’t I?” he said.

“Not too much anymore,” she said. “You can make up for it, though.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“You don’t either,” she said. “Guess.”

“You’re going to say I can make up for treating you like a little girl by letting you have your own mind today, by not trying to talk you into anything.”

“That goes without saying, I hope. But you’re wrong, smart guy. I was going to say you could convince me you see me as a responsible adult by letting me drive your car back from the airport Monday.”

“That’s easy,” Rayford said, suddenly switching to a babyish voice. “Would that make you feel like a big girl? OK, Daddy will do that.”

She punched him and smiled, then quickly sobered. “It’s amazing what amuses me these days,” she said. “Good grief, I feel like an awful person.”

Rayford let that comment hang in the air as he turned the corner and the tasteful little church came into view. “Don’t make too much of what I just said,” Chloe said. “I don’t have to come in, do I?”

“No, but I’d appreciate it.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head, but when he parked and got out, she followed.

Bruce Barnes was short and slightly pudgy, with curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He dressed casually but with class, and Rayford guessed him to be in his early thirties. He emerged from the sanctuary with a small vacuum in his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “You must be the Steeles. I’m kind of the whole staff around here now, except for Loretta.”

“Hello,” an older woman said from behind Rayford and Chloe. She stood in the doorway of the church offices sunken-eyed and disheveled, as if she’d come through a war. After pleasantries she retreated to a desk in the outer office.

“She’s putting together a little program for tomorrow,” Barnes said. “Tough thing is, we have no idea how many to expect. Will you be here?”

“Not sure yet,” Rayford said. “I probably will be.”

They both looked at Chloe. She smiled politely. “I probably won’t be,” she said.

“Well, I’ve got the DVD for you,” Barnes said. “But I’d like to ask for a few more minutes of your time.”

“I’ve got time,” Rayford said.

“I’m with him,” Chloe said resignedly.

Barnes led them to the senior pastor’s office. “I don’t sit at his desk or use his library,” the younger man said, “but I do work in here at his conference table. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to the church, and I certainly don’t want to be presumptuous. I can’t imagine God would call me to take over this work, but if he does, I want to be ready.”

“And how will he call you?” Chloe said, a smile playing at her mouth. “By phone?”

Barnes didn’t respond in kind. “To tell you the truth, it wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know about you, but he got my attention last week. A phone call from heaven would have been less traumatic.”

Chloe raised her eyebrows, apparently in surrender to his point.

“Folks, Loretta there looks like I feel. We’re shell-shocked and we’re devastated, because we know exactly what happened.”

“Or you think you do,” Chloe said. Rayford tried to catch her eye to encourage her to back off, but she seemed unwilling to look at him. “There’s every kind of theory you want on every TV show in the country.”

“I know that,” Barnes said.

“And each is self-serving,” she added. “The tabloids say it was space invaders, which would prove the stupid stories they’ve been running for years. The government says it’s some sort of enemy, so we can spend more on high-tech defense. You’re going to say it was God so you can start rebuilding your church.”

Bruce Barnes sat back and looked at Chloe, then at her father. “I’m going to ask you something,” he said, turning to her again. “Could you let me tell you my story briefly, without interrupting or saying anything, unless there’s something you don’t understand?”

Chloe stared at him without responding.

“I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want you to be either. I asked for a few moments of your time. If I still have it, I want to try to make use of it. Then I’ll leave you alone. You can do anything you want with what I tell you. Tell me I’m crazy, tell me I’m self-serving. Leave and never come back. That’s up to you. But can I have the floor for a few minutes?”

Rayford thought Barnes was brilliant. He had put Chloe in her place, leaving her no smart remark. She merely waved a hand of permission, for which Barnes thanked her, and he began.

“May I call you by your first names?”

Rayford nodded. Chloe didn’t respond.

“Ray, is it? And Chloe? I sit here before you a broken man. And Loretta? If anyone has a right to feel as bad as I do, it’s Loretta. She’s the only person in her whole clan who is still here. She had six living brothers and sisters, I don’t know how many aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews. They had a wedding here last year and she must have had a hundred relatives alone. They’re all gone, every one of them.”

“That’s awful,” Chloe said. “We lost my mom and my little brother, you know. Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“It’s all right,” Barnes said. “My situation is almost as bad as Loretta’s, only on a smaller scale. Of course it’s not small for me. Let me tell you my story.” As soon as he began with seemingly innocuous details, his voice grew thick and quiet. “I was in bed with my wife. She was sleeping. I was reading. Our children had been down for a couple of hours. They were five, three, and one. The oldest was a girl, the other two boys. That was normal for us—me reading while my wife slept. She worked so hard with the kids and a part-time job that she was always knocked out by nine or so.

“I was reading a sports magazine, trying to turn the pages quietly, and every once in a while she would sigh. Once she even asked how much longer I would be. I knew I should go in the other room or just turn the light off and try to sleep myself. But I told her, ‘Not long,’ hoping she’d fall asleep and I could just read the whole magazine. I can usually tell by her breathing if she’s sleeping soundly enough that my light doesn’t bother her. And after a while I heard that deep breathing.

“I was glad. My plan was to read till midnight. I was propped up on an elbow with my back to her, using a pillow to shield the light a little. I don’t know how much longer I had been reading when I felt the bed move and sensed she had gotten up. I assumed she was going to the bathroom and only hoped she didn’t wake up to the point where she’d bug me about still having the light on when she got back. She’s a tiny little thing, and it didn’t hit me that I didn’t hear her walk to the bathroom. But, like I say, I was engrossed in my reading.

“After a few more minutes I called out, ‘Hon, you OK?’ And I didn’t hear anything. I began wondering, was it just my imagination that she had gotten up? I reached behind me and she was not there, so I called out again. I thought maybe she was checking on the kids, but usually she’s such a sound sleeper that unless she’s heard one of them she doesn’t do that.

“Well, probably another minute or two went by before I turned over and noticed that she was not only gone, but that it also appeared she had pulled the sheet and covers back up toward her pillow. Now you can imagine what I thought. I thought she was so frustrated at me for still reading that she had given up waiting for me to turn off the light and decided to go sleep on the couch. I’m a fairly decent husband, so I went out to apologize and bring her back to bed.

“You know what happened. She wasn’t out on the couch. She wasn’t in the bathroom. I poked my head into each of the kids’ rooms and whispered for her, thinking maybe she was rocking one of them or sitting in there. Nothing. The lights were off all over the house, except for my bedside. I didn’t want to wake the kids by yelling for her, so I just turned on the hall light and checked their rooms again.

“I’m ashamed to say I still didn’t have a clue until I noticed my oldest two kids weren’t in their beds. My first thought was that they had gone into the baby’s room, like they do sometimes, to sleep on the floor. Then I thought my wife had taken one or both of them to the kitchen for something. Frankly I was just a little perturbed that I didn’t know what was going on in the middle of the night.

“When the baby was not in his crib, I turned the light on, stuck my head out the door and called down the hall for my wife. No answer. Then I noticed the baby’s footie pajamas in the crib, and I knew. I just knew. It hit me all of a sudden. I ran from room to room, pulling back the covers and finding the kids’ pajamas. I didn’t want to, but I tore the cover back from my wife’s side of the bed and there was her nightgown, her rings, and even her hair clips on the pillow.”

Rayford was fighting the tears, remembering his own similar experience. Barnes took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his eyes. “Well, I started phoning around,” he said. “I started with the pastor, but of course I got his voice mail. A couple of other places I got voice mail, too, so I grabbed the church directory and started looking up older folks, the people I thought might not have voice mail. I let their phones ring off the hook. Nobody answered.

“Of course I knew it was unlikely I’d find anybody. For some reason I ran out and jumped in my car and raced over here to the church. There was Loretta, sitting in her car in her robe, hair up in curlers, crying her eyes out. We came into the foyer and sat by the potted plants, crying and holding each other, knowing exactly what had happened. Within about half an hour, a few others showed up. We basically commiserated and wondered aloud what we were supposed to do next. Then somebody remembered Pastor’s Rapture DVD.”

“His what?” Chloe asked.

“Our senior pastor loved to preach about the coming of Christ to rapture his church, to take believers, dead and alive, to heaven before a period of tribulation on the earth. He was particularly inspired once a couple of years ago.”

Rayford turned to Chloe. “You remember your mother talking about that. She was so enthusiastic about it.”

“Oh yeah, I do.”

“Well,” Barnes said, “the pastor used that sermon and had himself recorded in this office speaking directly to people who were left behind. He put it in the church library with instructions to get it out and play it if most everyone seemed to have disappeared. We all watched it a couple of times the other night. A few people wanted to argue with God, trying to tell us that they really had been believers and should have been taken with the others, but we all knew the truth. We had been phony. There wasn’t a one of us who didn’t know what it meant to be a true Christian. We knew we weren’t and that we had been left behind.”

Rayford had trouble speaking, but he had to ask. “Mr. Barnes, you were on the staff here.”

“Right.”

“How did you miss it?”

“I’m going to tell you, Ray, because I no longer have anything to hide. I’m ashamed of myself, and if I never really had the desire or the motivation to tell others about Christ before, I sure have it now. I just feel awful that it took the most cataclysmic event in history to reach me. I was raised in the church. My parents and brothers and sisters were all Christians.

“I loved church. It was my life, my culture. I thought I believed everything there was to believe in the Bible. The Bible says that if you believe in Christ you have eternal life, so I assumed I was covered.

“I especially liked the parts about God being forgiving. I was a sinner, and I never changed. I just kept getting forgiveness because I thought God was bound to do that. He had to. Verses that said if we confessed our sins he was faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. I knew other verses said you had to believe and receive, to trust and to abide, but to me that was sort of theological mumbo jumbo. I wanted the bottom line, the easiest route, the simplest path. I knew other verses said that we are not to continue in sin just because God shows grace.

“I thought I had a great life. I even went to Bible college. In church and at school, I said the right things and prayed in public and even encouraged people in their Christian lives. But I was still a sinner. I even said that. I told people I wasn’t perfect; I was forgiven.”

“My wife said that,” Rayford said.

“The difference is,” Bruce said, “she was sincere. I lied. I told my wife that we tithed to the church, you know, that we gave ten percent of our income. I hardly ever gave any, except when the plate was passed I might drop in a few bills to make it look good. Every week I would confess that to God, promising to do better next time.

“I encouraged people to share their faith, to tell other people how to become Christians. But on my own I never did that. My job was to visit people in their homes and nursing homes and hospitals every day. I was good at it. I encouraged them, smiled at them, talked with them, prayed with them, even read Scripture to them. But I never did that on my own, privately.

“I was lazy. I cut corners. When people thought I was out calling, I might be at a movie in another town. I was also lustful. I read things I shouldn’t have read, looked at magazines that fed my lusts.”

Rayford winced. That hit too close to home.

“I had a real racket going,” Barnes was saying, “and I bought into it. Down deep, way down deep, I knew better. I knew it was too good to be true. I knew that true Christians were known by what their lives produced and that I was producing nothing. But I comforted myself that there were worse people around who called themselves Christians.

“I wasn’t a rapist or a child molester or an adulterer, though many times I felt unfaithful to my wife because of my lusts. But I could always pray and confess and feel as though I was clean. It should have been obvious to me. When people found out I was on the pastoral staff at New Hope, I would tell them about the cool pastor and the neat church, but I was shy about telling them about Christ. If they challenged me and asked if New Hope was one of those churches that said Jesus was the only way to God, I did everything but deny it. I wanted them to think I was OK, that I was with it. I may be a Christian and even a pastor, but don’t lump me with the weirdos. Above all, don’t do that.

“I see now, of course, that God is a sin-forgiving God, because we’re human and we need that. But we are to receive his gift, abide in Christ, and allow him to live through us. I used what I thought was my security as a license to do what I wanted. I could basically live in sin and pretend to be devout. I had a great family and a nice work environment. And as miserable as I was privately most of the time, I really believed I would go to heaven when I died.

“I hardly ever read my Bible except when preparing a talk or lesson. I didn’t have the ‘mind of Christ.’ Christian, I knew vaguely, means ‘Christ one’ or ‘one like Christ.’ That sure wasn’t me, and I found out in the worst way possible.

“Let me just say to you both—this is your decision. These are your lives. But I know, and Loretta knows, and a few others who were playing around the edges here at this church know exactly what happened a few nights ago. Jesus Christ returned for his true family, and the rest of us were left behind.”

Bruce looked Chloe in the eyes. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have witnessed the Rapture. My biggest fear, once I realized the truth, was that there was no more hope for me. I had missed it, I had been a phony, I had set up my own brand of Christianity that may have made for a life of freedom but had cost me my soul. I had heard people say that when the church was raptured, God’s Spirit would be gone from the earth. The logic was that when Jesus went to heaven after his resurrection, the Holy Spirit that God gave to the church was embodied in believers. So when they were taken, the Spirit would be gone, and there would be no more hope for anyone left. You can’t know the relief when Pastor’s DVD showed me otherwise.

“We realize how stupid we were, but those of us in this church—at least the ones who felt drawn to this building the night everyone else disappeared—are now as zealous as we can be. No one who comes here will leave without knowing exactly what we believe and what we think is necessary for them to have a relationship with God.”

Chloe stood and paced, her arms folded across her chest. “That’s a pretty interesting story,” she said. “What was the deal with Loretta? How did she miss it if her whole extended family were true Christians?”

“You should have her tell you sometime,” Bruce said. “But she tells me it was pride and embarrassment that kept her from Christ. She was a middle child in a very religious family, and she said she was in her late teens before she even thought seriously about her personal faith. She had just drifted along with the family to church and all the related activities. As she grew up, got married, became a mother and a grandmother, she just let everyone assume she was a spiritual giant. She was revered around here. Only she had never believed and received Christ for herself.”

“So,” Chloe said, “this believing and receiving stuff, this living for Christ or letting him live through you, that’s what my mother meant when she talked about salvation, getting saved?”

Bruce nodded. “From sin and hell and judgment.”

“Meantime, we’re not saved from all that.”

“That’s right.”

“You really believe this.”

“I do.”

“It’s pretty freaky stuff, you have to admit.”

“Not to me. Not anymore.”

Rayford, always one for precision and order, asked, “So, what did you do? What did my wife do? What made her more of a Christian, or, ah . . . what, uh—”

“Saved her?” Bruce said.

“Yes,” Rayford said. “That’s exactly what I want to know. If you’re right, and I’ve already told Chloe that I think I see this now, we need to know how it works. How it goes. How does a person get from one situation to the other? Obviously, we were not saved from being left, and we’re here to face life without our loved ones who were true Christians. So, how do we become true Christians?”

“I’m going to walk you through that,” Bruce said. “And I’m going to send you home with the DVD. And I’m going to go through this all in detail tomorrow morning at ten for whoever shows up. I’ll probably do the same lesson every Sunday morning for as long as people need to know. One thing I’m sure of, as important as all the other sermons and lessons are, nothing matters like this one.”

While Chloe stood with her back to the wall, arms still folded, watching and listening, Bruce turned to Rayford. “It’s really quite simple. God made it easy. That doesn’t mean it’s not a supernatural transaction or that we can pick and choose the good parts—as I tried to do. But if we see the truth and act on it, God won’t withhold salvation from us.

“First, we have to see ourselves as God sees us. The Bible says all have sinned, that there is none righteous, no not one. It also says we can’t save ourselves. Lots of people thought they could earn their way to God or to heaven by doing good things, but that’s probably the biggest misconception ever. Ask anyone on the street what they think the Bible or the church says about getting to heaven, and nine of ten would say it has something to do with doing good and living right.

“We’re to do that, of course, but not so we can earn our salvation. We’re to do that in response to our salvation. The Bible says that it’s not by works of righteousness that we have done, but by his mercy God saved us. It also says that we are saved by grace through Christ, not of ourselves, so we can’t brag about our goodness.

“Jesus took our sins and paid the penalty for them so we wouldn’t have to. The payment is death, and he died in our place because he loved us. When we tell Christ that we acknowledge ourselves as sinners and lost, and receive his gift of salvation, he saves us. A transaction takes place. We go from darkness to light, from lost to found; we’re saved. The Bible says that to those who receive him, he gives the power to become sons of God. That’s what Jesus is—the Son of God. When we become sons of God, we have what Jesus has: a relationship with God, eternal life, and because Jesus paid our penalty, we also have forgiveness for our sins.”

Rayford sat stunned. He sneaked a peek at Chloe. She looked frozen, but she didn’t appear antagonistic. Rayford felt he had found exactly what he was looking for. It was what he had suspected and had heard bits and pieces of over the years, but he had never put it all together. In spite of himself, he was still reserved enough to want to mull it over, to see and hear the DVD, and to discuss it with Chloe.

“I have to ask you,” Bruce said, “something I never wanted to ask people before. I want to know if you’re ready to receive Christ right now. I would be happy to pray with you and lead you in how to talk to God about this.”

“No,” Chloe said quickly, looking at her dad as if afraid he was going to do something foolish.

“No?” Bruce was clearly surprised. “Need more time?”

“At least,” Chloe said. “Surely this isn’t something you rush into.”

“Well, let me tell you,” Bruce said. “It’s something I wish I had rushed into. I believe God has forgiven me and that I have a job to do here. But I don’t know what’s going to happen now, with the true Christians all gone. I’d sure rather have come to this point years ago than now, when it was nearly too late. You can imagine that I would much rather be in heaven with my family right now.”

“But then who would tell us about this?” Rayford asked.

“Oh, I’m grateful for that opportunity,” Bruce said. “But it has cost me dearly.”

“I understand.” Rayford could feel Bruce’s eyes burning into him as if the young man knew Rayford was nearly ready to make a commitment. But he had never rushed into anything in his life. And while he didn’t put this on the same scale as dealing with a salesman, he needed time to think, a cooling-off period. He was analytical, and while this suddenly made a world of sense to him and he didn’t doubt at all Bruce’s theory of the disappearances, he would not act immediately. “I’d appreciate the DVD, and I can guarantee you, I will be back tomorrow.”

Bruce looked at Chloe. “No guarantees from me,” she said, “but I appreciate your time and I will watch the DVD.”

“That’s all I can ask,” Bruce said. “But let me leave you with one little reminder of urgency. You may have heard this off and on your whole lives, the way I did. Maybe you haven’t. But I need to tell you that you don’t have any guarantees. It’s too late for you to disappear like your loved ones did a few days ago. But people die every day in car accidents, plane crashes—oh, sorry, I’m sure you’re a good pilot—all kinds of tragedies. I’m not going to push you into something you’re not ready for, but just let me encourage you that if God impresses upon you that this is true, don’t put it off. What would be worse than finally finding God and then dying without him because you waited too long?”