Left Behind in Las Cruces

It snowed in Las Cruces maybe twice in my entire childhood, which is how I can date this memory so precisely. I was 7 or 8, home watching a movie, when I realized I hadn't heard another human being in a while.

I got up, called for my dad and got nothing back. I went room to room calling louder each time, and every room was empty. So I did what any reasonable kid raised on rapture sermons would do. I ran out into the snow, stood in that eerie quiet you only get when it snows in the desert, and arrived at the obvious conclusion: I missed the rapture. Jesus had come back for everyone and left me standing in the front yard in my socks.

What gets me now is that my brain skipped right past every reasonable explanation and went straight to a single global supernatural event. Turns out my dad had walked two houses down to borrow a tool from the neighbor. He came back a few minutes later and found me standing in the yard looking like I'd just seen the end of the world.

I can laugh about it now, but the panic was real. That kid in the snow was the product of a pretty rigorous spiritual accounting system.

•••

In the church I grew up in, salvation wasn't exactly a one-time thing. You could sin it away, which meant the whole thing needed regular maintenance. So every other Sunday, little Ronnie was up at the front running it back, securing his salvation one more time just to be sure.

The math was constant. Was I currently in or out? If the trumpet sounded right now, before I had a chance to ask for forgiveness, where did that leave me?

It was a pretty constant back and forth with myself doing mental gymnastics on if I was saved or not. This wasn't what I think people at my church were trying to do necessarily. Nobody was trying to terrorize a second grader, but somewhere between the sermons and the altar calls, heaven stopped being something I wanted and became something I was scared of missing. There's a difference, and it took me a long time to see it.

•••

What I didn't notice until my twenties was that all those years of trying not to miss heaven, I don't ever remember actually wanting to go (at least not really.) Heaven was just the prize at the end of the rainbow that beat the alternative.

That finally changed when I started to slowly realize that the real prize at the end was never heaven in and of itself. It was Jesus. The whole point of the place is who's in it.

The psalmist figured this out about three thousand years before I did:

“Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.”

— Psalm 73:25

That's the same guy who would take God without heaven over heaven without God. I'm not sure the version of faith I grew up with would have known what to do with that sentence.

•••

Over the last several weeks, I've been reading Brian Zahnd's new book, Unseen Existences, and it's been putting language to a lot of this. His argument, more or less, is that we traded a rich, ancient vision of heaven for a thin one. Heaven as an evacuation plan and salvation as a reservation you hold for the afterlife and try not to lose. That's the version I grew up bracing for.

But that's not where Scripture lands. Revelation doesn't end with us escaping this place, it ends with heaven coming down:

“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.'”

— Revelation 21:2-3

The trajectory of the whole story is God moving toward us and the writer of Hebrews calls the faithful pilgrims, people "longing for a better country" (Hebrews 11:16), walking toward a home they've never seen but already belong to. Pilgrim is a good word here, even if it only drums up pictures of people in funny black and white clothes.

•••

Every once in a while it still happens. I'll be home and realize the house has gone quiet, that I haven't heard Dannie or the girls in a while. Usually it just means everybody's in the backyard.

I still believe the rapture's coming. That part I never let go of. What changed is what it sits on. For years it sat on me, on whether I'd squared my account that particular week, whether I was current. Now it sits on Jesus and what he already did, which is a much sturdier thing to stand on than an 8 year old's mental math.

So I'm not scared of getting left in the yard anymore. Not because I finally got the bookkeeping right, but because it was never my bookkeeping holding the whole thing together. And whatever order it all happens in, the trumpet, the church, the new Jerusalem coming down, it ends the same way. God with his people just like my dad coming back up the driveway that day.

That kid in the snow was sure he'd been left behind. Thirty something years later I know better. Nobody who belongs to Jesus gets left in the yard.