Rapture Practice Read Online Free PDF Page B

quiet for a minute as we pass a big movie theater. Families are walking out of the building toward their cars, and I wonder which movie they saw. If I had a choice, I’d go to the movies on Sunday night instead of church. I’ll bet no one cares whether you wear socks at the theater.
    A pang of guilt shoots through my stomach for even thinking that, but I can’t help it. The whole thing about God knowing exactly what will happen but giving humans a choice to believe in Him—even though he knows many won’t, or worse,
can’t
because no one has told them about Jesus—it seems like a bad plan. Like socks with boat shoes.
    Dad’s question about whether I want to be a missionary feels so silly now. If God already knows which people will get into heaven and which people he’ll send to hell, then being a missionary seems like a waste of time. The people who aregoing to be saved are going to get into heaven whether I am the person who tells them about Jesus or not, right?
    Has God created a bunch of people
knowing
He’ll have to send them to hell to burn in torment for all of eternity? That would just make God a jerk. Surely, that can’t be right.
Can it?
    My head feels foggy. I take a deep breath and say a silent prayer.
God, help me understand.
    “Tell me again,” I say. “How do we know
for sure
that the Bible is true?”
    Without hesitation, Mom and Dad reply instantly as one voice: “Because it says it is.”
    Their answer feels like sand slipping through my fingers. My stomach leaps the way it does on the first drop of the Orient Express at Worlds of Fun.
    “Are you okay, Aaron?”
    Dad is looking at me in the rearview mirror. I realize I am frowning, and quickly relax my face as I did when I was a little boy playing dead.
    Don’t move a muscle.
    “Yes, sir,” I say, and turn away from his gaze to look out the window.
    But I am not fine. I simply don’t know what else to say. As our car navigates a busy intersection, I have the sudden urge to double-check to make sure my father is still in the front seat, driving. When I see him there, it does not quiet the racing of my heart, or soothe the panic in my stomach, or calm this fear I cannot shake—that no one is at the wheel; that at any moment we might spin wildly out of control.

CHAPTER 5
    “Boys and girls, let’s get things started off with a song!”
    It’s Thursday afternoon following sock Sunday. Once more Mom greets each kid who comes for Good News Club with a hug and a smile. Once more we sing “Countdown!” Once more I show the other kids how to jump up in the air.
    I can’t jump as high as I did when I was younger, because I’m taller now and I can touch the ceiling of the family room, but today it’s not my height stopping me. Something else is different, too. I try to figure out what it is as we finish the song, and Mom directs us all in reading aloud the Bible verse printed in the back of the rocket ship songbook: “John 14:3: And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”
    I glance over at Randy, who smiles at me as we sit back down.
    A few weeks before, Dad talked about Randy from the pulpit during one of the seminars he teaches for parents and Christian schoolteachers about how to raise godly children.He explained to the congregation that Mom is a missionary right here in our family room, spreading the Good News around the neighborhood. Dad said how sad it was that when Randy first came to our house, he had never heard the name of Jesus.
    “That poor boy owns every satanic toy you can buy, but he doesn’t have a Bible,” Dad said with a sad shake of his head. “Randy is one of our American heathens.”
    When Dad said the word
heathens
, I got this image of Randy with a bone through his nose, wearing a grass skirt while dancing around a fire in the jungle, and a thought went through my head:
    What if Randy isn’t preordained?
    What if he isn’t one