Prophet by Frank E. Peretti

Author:Frank E. Peretti
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Christian, Action & Adventure, General
ISBN: 9781581345261
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2004-03-10T22:00:00+00:00

2

I stood outside Mom’s bedroom door and listened to Prophet’s muffled voice. I couldn’t make out what he said, but after a month of Mom obsessively watching his televised sermons, I could guess the subject matter.

The end of the world is at hand.

Those who surrender their souls to Prophet will be saved.

Those who don’t will suffer and die and suffer some more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We heard you the first time.

“Mom?” I tapped on the door before turning the knob. It was seven in the morning, and outside the sun was doing its job, but Mom’s bedroom was a cave. She sat at her window in the grungy bathrobe she hadn’t shed in days, peeking through the slats in the blinds. Her eyes traveled back and forth between the window and the TV, which was playing The Hour of Light, Rance Ridley Prophet’s morning broadcast. He did three shows a day: morning, midday, and evening. Ever since we brought her home from the hospital, Mom had been obsessed with Prophet. The only way she missed his broadcast was if the electricity or cable went out. I almost looked forward to those outages now.

“Brothers and sisters,” Prophet intoned, “God will soon make His final judgment. You must decide now on which side you will stand, on the side of heaven, or on the side of earth and its wicked, worldly pleasures. Will you be lifted up, raptured to paradise, or laid low by God’s terrible vengeance?”

Prophet’s voice drowned out my entrance into the bedroom. Sometimes I wondered if Mom’s hearing was somehow damaged during the quake. She seemed so oblivious to what went on around her. The doctor who attended to her for all of five minutes before he gave her bed away to someone more needy said she was fine. Malnourished and dehydrated, but she’d live. After three days trapped under a collapsed building, she had some bad bruises, a few cracked ribs, and a dozen lacerations on her face and arms—caused by the wall of glass that had exploded near her when the building started to buckle—most of which had nearly healed by now. Physically, she was as sound as could be expected. Mental health was another matter.

The Internet—along with our utilities and cable—had been in and out since the quake, but when our connection was working I’d researched Mom’s symptoms until I determined what was wrong with her: Acute Stress Disorder—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’s evil twin on steroids—caused by a traumatic event, which is reexperienced in flashbacks, anxiety, delusions, emotional detachment, even amnesia.

Mom had all the symptoms and then some. She should have been in a hospital, under the care of a psychiatrist and a team of nurses tending to her round the clock. But the hospitals were still full of patients with actual life threatening injuries, people with broken backs and crushed limbs and infected burns. People suffering from earthquake fever, an immunity disorder caused by mold released from the ground during the quake. People so malnourished and

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