IGMS - Issue 23 by IGMS

Author:IGMS
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hatrack River Enterprises
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Two years before I met Marian, my name had been Gary. As I walked down the streets of Providence, barefoot and destitute, the life insurance company I'd given eleven years of my life to suddenly bankrupt, I heard the call. Business Week's cover story was "The Mustard Seed Movement: How a Little Faith Grows Big Profits." I found a copy in the garbage and used it for heat after I read it. As I stared into the flames that night, Jesus spoke to me.

"Gary," He said. "Gary, why have they forsaken me?"

I was arrested on Christmas Eve for stealing Nativities. In jail, one of the guys, a burly black man with NICK DAWG tattooed along his muscular neck, got me talking about the Rapture.

"You Fundies believe that shit, man? About floating up into the sky?"

Another guy in the common cell snorted. "I can get high without Jesus, mange." He pinched two fingers together and pressed them to his lips making a sucking noise. Several of the others in the cell laughed. "You just need the right pipe."

I smiled at him but spoke dead serious to NICK DAWG. "The Rapture is coming," I told him, slipping into street talk. "But when it comes, ain't nobody gonna know about it. It's gonna come like a thief in the night --"

"The kind that steals plastic Virgins and Wise Men?" That got another laugh, but they were listening to me. I was witnessing to the sinners, and they were listening.

"No, the Rapture is gonna come when nobody expects it, and all those who've been saved will be gone from this vale of tears. The rest of ya'll suckers will be looking at the times of Tribulation, when men turn to false gods and have to live every day under the reign of Satan."

"How are all these people supposed to get raptured?" NICK DAWG asked again. "Just fly up into the air like the Goodwill Blimp had soul magnets on it?"

My turn to laugh, but not too hard. I had to remember where I was. "When the Rapture comes, those that believe will go to live with the Lord," I said.

"You mean they die?" another one of my cellmates asked.

"Not their souls."

A dude in green flannel -- he'd said he was in for beating on his old lady -- cleared his throat. "So if no one knows when it happens, and people just die and shit, how you know it didn't already go down?"

"Who's to say it didn't? Or that it only happens once instead of as a process over time? God built the world in seven days and waited forty before he let it stop raining. Ever since then it's taken longer and longer for him to do anything miraculous down here."

NICK DAWG's jaw flopped open. "It says that crap in the Bible?"

"If you know how to read it."

"And how's that?"

"With Fundie eyes," I said. I grabbed the bars of the cell doors and prayed for all of them, that they might see as I did.

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