Rapture Practice (7 page)

“Where are we eating tonight?” I ask.

“I heard something about a steak house,” he says.

It’s Friday, our last night of counselor orientation. We have tomorrow off, and then our first batch of campers shows up on Sunday. We’re driving into town tonight to have dinner with the other counselors. Jason drives an old sports car from the 1960s that he’s restored and painted candy-apple red. It’s so glossy it looks wet.

“Can I ride into town with you tonight?” I ask.

Jason turns and looks at me, perplexed. “Of course you’re riding with me. You don’t have to ask.”

I smile as he turns back to the mirror and finishes with his razor. He splashes water on his cheeks and blots his face dry with the towel that was slung over his shoulder. There is something effortless and attractive about this movement, and I notice how different our bodies are. Namely, I am tall but very thin. Jason’s muscles make him look like an advertisement for shaving, or for drying your face—or for manliness in general.

On the way into town, he cranks up the stereo. The speakers in his antique car are brand-new and thump with every lick of bass. He’s got music I’ve never heard of by a singer named Roxette, and his favorite song is a pounding anthem called “The Look.”

I love this music, and a smile spreads across my face as I realize I’ll be able to listen to whatever I want to for the next six weeks. My parents are three hundred miles away in Kansas City. I don’t have to ask their permission about anything, or worry about them finding out if I don’t.

The song reaches a crescendo and suddenly cuts out. Jason pumps his fist in the air and counts “two… three… four…” and then bangs on the steering wheel as the music explodes through the speakers again at full force.

The warm, humid air whips through my hair, and as we pull up to the restaurant and see the other counselors getting out of their cars, I can’t help feeling a surge of excitement that I’m finally grown up. This is what it feels like to be my own
person, to have my own friends, to listen to my own music. I’m laughing and talking and feeling… free. I don’t have to hurry home. I don’t have to worry about curfew or explaining to Mom and Dad whom I’m going to meet where.

This is the first time I’ve ever been completely on my own.

After we eat, our whole group takes a stroll around the tiny, quaint town of Central City, Nebraska. Allison catches up to Jason and me with Melody, a tiny college gymnast whose blue eye shadow has metallic flecks in it. She’s telling me a funny story about campers from last summer when I look up and realize that our big group of counselors has stopped.

We’re all standing in front of a movie theater. In fact, we’re in a line at the box office.

The theater is a historic building with a neon sign above the marquee that spells out the word
STATE
, and a ticket booth on the sidewalk. One by one, each of our group takes a turn at the window. As I watch, my palms get sweaty. Melody is still talking, but I can’t hear anything she’s saying as Jason buys a ticket. He’s my ride. Am I going to sit on the curb for two hours while he watches the movie?

This
is that moment, the one Mom talks about—the moment when I have to decide for myself which choice I’ll make.

Mom and Dad will never know you disobeyed them.

The voice in my head is loud and clear, but then my conscience kicks in. It’s a tiny whisper that answers back:

God will know you disobeyed.

Mom and Dad are hundreds of miles away in Kansas City, but it feels like they are right here looking over my shoulder. Mom says the Holy Spirit is the still, small voice inside me who helps me resist temptation. He knows
everything
. Every word. Every action. Every thought.

Sharing your brain with God can be handy when you need to pray in a hurry:

God, help me to remember the formula for the circumference of circle.

God, help me not to mess up on the piano solo I’m playing in church.

God, please don’t let Dad take us to Panama next year to be missionaries.

It can also be exhausting. At moments when decisions need to be made quickly, the idea that God can hear my every thought always gets in the way and gums up the works. It makes some decisions very difficult, especially this one.

“You comin’ man?” Jason asks.

I smile but say nothing.

“I’m going to go in and save seats,” he says. As he holds open the door for Melody and Allison, he jerks his head toward them and grins, mouthing the words
Hurry up!
over his shoulder.

I watch them disappear into the theater with the other counselors, and for a moment, I stand alone on the curb. My heart is racing. My mouth is dry. Finally, I square my shoulders and step up to the ticket window.

“One for
Hunt for Red October
, please.”

Unless Jesus comes back in the next two minutes, I am going to break one of Mom and Dad’s biggest rules. My cheeks are hot. I feel out of breath. A drop of sweat trickles down my back, but the girl behind the glass doesn’t even look up at me. She has no idea what is happening in my head, what a big deal this is for me. She couldn’t be less interested.

I slide a five-dollar bill under the window. She hands back a small yellow ticket between neon nails so long they curve.

“Enjoy the show.”

I take a deep breath.

I take a look over my shoulder.

I take the ticket.

Ever since
E.T.
, I’ve always known that one day I’d break the movie rule, but I sure didn’t see it coming
today
. In all of my midnight imaginings of this moment, I never considered it might happen at a historic theater in Nebraska, but as I walk through the front door, I realize something:

This place is perfect.

There is a sense of history here—the dark wood and plush velvet curtains hold a grandeur that matches the momentousness of the event. I feel a surge of excitement. It feels dangerous but thrilling. For the first time in my life, I am actually living something I’ve dreamed about, learning that a midnight imagining can leap out of the darkness and splash across the hi-def, full-color, Dolby digital surround-sound screen of your life in a place where you least expect it. Like Nebraska.

My fingers are sweaty around the little yellow ticket as
I walk from the box office across the lobby toward the door that leads into the theater. I feel so nervous I am afraid I might throw up. My knees are shaking, so I pause briefly by the concession stand, but not because I want popcorn.

You can still walk out. You can sit on the curb and wait for Jason.

Is this the voice of God’s Holy Spirit encouraging me to do the right thing? I don’t want to wait on the curb. This is my chance. Mom and Dad will never know.

Dad’s voice pops into my head: “Integrity is doing the right thing even when God is the only one watching.”

Well, God and, in this case, the popcorn guy.

“Our almighty God loves you so much he keeps track of the hairs you lose,” Mom likes to remind me. “He knows the secrets you’d never tell anyone else.”

I’ve believed that God is omnipresent since I was a little boy, but for the first time, it strikes me as
odd
. Is it
weird
that I think there’s an invisible being listening to every thought I have at every moment? Do I really believe if I walk into this theater, God is going in with me? Do I think God cares whether I go see a movie?

I know Mom and Dad care. They would say this is a choice between honoring them and disobeying them; that pleasing God in this case means obeying them—sitting on the curb for a couple of hours and missing the movie.

“Want anything, man?” The popcorn guy sounds impatient.

I want parents who don’t think going to see a movie is a big deal.

I shake my head. “No. Thanks.”

Popcorn Guy heads outside for a smoke. I feel so frustrated—with the situation, with my own indecision.

I want to go to this movie.

This thought isn’t the voice of God, or Mom, or Dad. It’s my own voice. I recognize it instantly, and the moment I do, all the other voices in my head flip off like a switch. Stillness drops like a curtain across the space between my ears. The silence is deafening.

Now I can hear the other sounds in the room: Jason and Allison laughing around the corner in the theater, the hum of the ice machine behind the concession counter. In the lobby of the State Theater in Central City, Nebraska, for the first time ever, I feel completely…

Alone.

It only lasts for a split second. Popcorn Guy walks back in from his smoke. I tell him I’ve changed my mind. I order a big bucket of popcorn with lots of butter, and a large Coke. Then I slip the yellow ticket stub into the hip pocket of my jeans and step inside the theater.

“Boys and girls, how many of you live on a farm?”

Hands fly up around the campfire. Not surprising. Nebraska has a lot of agriculture.

“Well, our story tonight is about a boy named Jimmy, and he lived on a farm, like a lot of you do. One of Jimmy’s chores
was to gather the eggs laid by his favorite hen, Speckles. Speckles was a beautiful bird, and Jimmy loved her more than anything else in the whole world. He took her fresh water and food every day, and Speckles would cluck and come running when she saw him.”

I always modify the story to fit the audience. If it’s mainly girls, I play up the petting and nuzzling. Girls like a pretty Speckles, so I describe her two-toned coppery feathers in detail. If the crowd is mostly boys, I go heavy on the “pals” part of the story. There is lots of playing in the fields, and tree climbing. There are adventures for this chicken that are undoubtedly beyond the realm of most commercial egg-laying operations.

Jason is grinning and hides his face at this part of the story. It’s ridiculous, and he knows it. I don’t mind. I’m telling a good story. This is the hook.

“One morning, Speckles wasn’t in the henhouse, and Jimmy couldn’t find her anywhere!”

There are gasps from the girls in Melody’s covered wagon. I see her put an arm around one of them and reassure her. A little boy from Jason’s cabin shouts out, “Oh, no!”

After telling about Jimmy’s exhaustive search for his hen, I show the picture of Speckles sitting on a nest hidden in the tall grass along the fence on the back forty. There is palpable relief around the campfire, and then excitement as Jimmy realizes Speckles has laid eggs she wants to hatch. Jimmy goes down to check on Speckles’s nest each day for weeks until one day the eggs hatch. Jimmy is thrilled, and he plans
to move Speckles and her chicks back to the henhouse the next morning.

That night, Jimmy wakes up to a great commotion, the smell of smoke, and the light of tall flames leaping up from the field behind the barn. Lightning had ignited a grass fire, and Jimmy has to work through the night with the farmhands and his dad, hauling water to put out the fire.

The next morning when Jimmy goes to the place where Speckles’s nest had been, he finds only her charred remains. As he starts to cry, Jimmy nudges her body with his foot, and six fluffy chicks begin to peep, wobbling out from beneath Speckles’s lifeless wings.

“You see, boys and girls,” I explain, “When Speckles smelled the smoke and saw the flames racing toward her, she realized that there was no escape. She gathered her chicks under her in the nest and spread her wings over them. As the flames passed over her body, Speckles made the greatest sacrifice of all for her chicks. She covered them with her feathers so that they would be saved. She died so that her children could live.”

Tears fill my eyes as I say these words. There is something about this story of sacrifice that quickens my heart each time I tell it, and breaks me open inside. This is the heavenly message of the “object lesson.” This is a parable about one person loving another enough to die.

No one around the circle of logs at the campfire is smiling anymore, not even Jason. Melody and the girls on the log next to her stare up in rapt attention. I can see their eyes glistening in the firelight as the Nebraska sky turns deep shades of
indigo behind me, the sun’s last rays shooting over the tops of pine trees at the edge of the clearing ringed by our covered-wagon cabins.

I quote my favorite Bible verse to the boys and girls, from Psalms, chapter 91: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty…. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.”

“Boys and girls, just like Speckles spread out her wings to cover her chicks, Jesus spread out his arms and allowed Roman soldiers to nail his hands and feet to a cross.”

The children are silent as I tell them how God the Father requires a blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins—the things that we have each done wrong. God cannot allow sin into heaven, and I quote the book of Romans: “For the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I explain atonement to the boys and girls—how God sent Jesus to die so that we could live forever. Jesus took our place on the cross and paid the price of our sins. His death spares us from the eternal death of a fiery hell, just as Speckles spared her chicks from the flames.