Rapture Rumors: A Journey Through Time
The internet says the rapture is scheduled for tonight, September 23, 2025. Fine. I’ve heard wilder.
During the ‘60s, in high school, Mother drove us to our youth group meeting. Beside her sat Lou—the girl of my dreams. Just being in the same car with her was a thrill.
They were talking about a rumor: that very night all virgins would be whisked away to Mars.
From the back seat, eager to sound witty, I quipped:
“Well, Lou, you don’t have anything to worry about!”
Dead silence. Lou gasped, turned, mouth open in disbelief.
Then my mother—never one for cushioning a blow—delivered her judgment:
“It’s best to keep your mouth shut when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And she was right. I had no idea what I was talking about. At that age, plenty of my classmates were already exploring things I hadn’t even begun to imagine. My understanding of “virgin” went no further than Mary, mother of Jesus.
Mars never filled with teenagers that night. Lou stayed lovely, and I stayed innocent—bewildered at why everyone in the car was staring at me.
So when I hear predictions that tonight’s the night—that the skies will split, the chosen will vanish, and the rest of us left behind—I just smile. I’ve been through this drill before. The world didn’t end then, and odds are it won’t tonight.
And if by some miracle the virgins really do take off for Mars this evening?
Well—don’t bother saving me a seat.
Vive la différence!
Recovering from Silence
I watch the women in my life — and who could resist? Each a marvel, her own constellation of strengths and mysteries. What strikes me most is their uncanny attunement: they know when something is right, and when it is not. Perhaps this is why their lives, more often than ours, run longer — they listen to themselves.
These days I find that same listening rising in me. My history, long buried in hidden folds, presses forward and names itself. The fiftieth anniversary of my marriage to Beth, my late wife, has brought me into strange country. Difference is not only what I admire in others; it is what I now confront in myself.
For years I kept my inner dialogue under lock. Sadness and joy alike I carried in silence. When I remarried, I spoke Beth’s name, but I hid my grief. I feared it would wound my wife to know sorrow still haunted me, so I consigned memory to the shadows. Silence gave sorrow room, but never joy.
Now the landscape shifts. What was once rolling and familiar has grown sharp and perilous. The gentle curves of remembrance have narrowed into hairpin turns; the easy hills have broken into sudden ridges, blind crests, and heart-stopping overlooks. Change no longer waits at a distance; it walks beside me.
I have wept more in the last month than in decades past. But the tears are welcome, because in speaking aloud — in sharing what I once held back — grief no longer stands alone. Joy has stepped out of hiding to take its place beside sorrow. And together they travel with me, companions at last.
Women are sometimes faulted for their sensitivity, their willingness to notice change within. But I am learning this is not theirs alone. It is human. And that discovery — that I too can listen, can open, can live — is the real difference.
Vive la différence!
Light Falls Across the Years
Light falls across the years; a ribbon that ties together mornings separated by decades.
Here in my kitchen on a quiet Sunday, the coffee not yet poured, I have left the lights off. From the east, the sun filters through late-summer oak leaves and finds its way inside. The beam slants low and sure, almost carrying texture in the air, as though light itself could be brushed with the hand.
And in an instant, I am a child again. I see the narrow blinds of my boyhood window, the sunlight carving bright stripes across the floor, shadow and brilliance arranged like notes of a song I did not yet know how to sing.
What surprises me now is not the memory itself, but its persistence. Across the long arc of living, my gaze has remained tuned to these small alterations of light and dark, to the way illumination lays itself down like a blessing on ordinary spaces. It is as if such moments have bracketed my days—beginning in wonder, and now, in later years, circling back to wonder again.
Living on Borrowed Time
When I would visit Crate Elliot, he would inevitably declare, “I’m livin’ on borrowed time, Preacher.”
Are not we all?
Until he entered my circle of friends, I thought borrowed time meant waiting for the reckoning. Watching him tend his garden and honor his wife with its produce, I learned a different lesson: borrowed time is a lens.
It reveals how the small enriches life — the nick on a cup, the cadence of an old friend’s greeting, the way sunlight lingers on a porch rail — until each ordinary thing becomes revelation.
Yes, there is a mild terror in knowing our days are bound. But there is also a clearer joy in choosing, every morning, what to keep. If grace appears anywhere, it is in the hands we extend when we know the hours are not infinite.
That is how I try to live now: making small deposits of tenderness, balancing a ledger with laughter and apology, learning to call the ordinary holy.
Life stretched long and thin pales beside a life meaningfully measured by small mercies extended in love, however short it may be. Living on borrowed time, I’ve come to see, is like living on the edge of infinity.
Peace
One frigid night I encamped, with the Scouts, in some woods on the shore of a pond. They, with great care and fearing frostbite, pitched their tents and in rapid moves, entered their tents, shed their coats, and dove into their sleeping bags. I did not see them again until after sunrise. The short days and long nights of early January, combined with the cold, had leached them of their enthusiasm for adventure.
I, on the other hand, stretched my ground cloth on the snow to lay, unsheltered, in my bag. Winter cold left me unbothered by insects and brilliant stars pierced clear skies to keep company. The great bear, pointing to Polaris, revolved like a backward running hour hand marking the passing of time on the clock face of the night sky.
An interrupted sleep is not the same as poor sleep. I awakened, at intervals, and marked the new position of companions in the sky. Each waking led me to marvel at the orderly progression of earth’s rotation; It reassured me of a night’s unbroken peace.
To those woods I long to return. To again visit the great bear and his companions; To share with my youthful friends the dying embers of the supper fire; to hear the rustle of their efforts to seek refuge from the cold. And to hope that they too may come to marvel at the unfettered peace of a night spent in company with the stars.
On a whim... 