Left Behind: A Novel Of Earth's Last Days (18 page)

“And how will he call you?” Chloe said, a smile playing at her mouth. “By phone?”

Barnes didn’t respond in kind. “To tell you the truth, it wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know about you, but he got my attention last week. A phone call from heaven would have been less traumatic.”

Chloe raised her eyebrows, apparently in surrender to his point.

“Folks, Loretta there looks like I feel. We’re shell-shocked and we’re devastated, because we know exactly what happened.”

“Or you think you do,” Chloe said. Rayford tried to catch her eye to encourage her to back off, but she seemed unwilling to look at him. “There’s every kind of theory you want on every TV show in the country.”

“I know that,” Barnes said.

“And each is self-serving,” she added. “The tabloids say it was space invaders, which would prove the stupid stories they’ve been running for years. The government says it’s some sort of enemy, so we can spend more on high-tech defense. You’re going to say it was God so you can start remodeling your church.”

Bruce Barnes sat back and looked at Chloe, then at her father. “I’m going to ask you something,” he said, turning to her again. “Could you let me tell you my story briefly, without interrupting or saying anything, unless there’s something you don’t understand?”

Chloe stared at him without responding.

“I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want you to be either. I asked for a few moments of your time. If I still have it, I want to try to make use of it. Then I’ll leave you alone. You can do anything you want with what I tell you. Tell me I’m crazy, tell me I’m self-serving. Leave and never come back. That’s up to you. But can I have the floor for a few minutes?”

Rayford thought Barnes was brilliant. He had put Chloe in her place, leaving her no smart remark. She merely waved a hand of permission, for which Barnes thanked her, and he began.

“May I call you by your first names?”

Rayford nodded. Chloe didn’t respond.

“Ray, is it? And Chloe? I sit here before you a broken man. And Loretta? If anyone has a right to feel as bad as I do, it’s Loretta. She’s the only person in her whole clan who is still here. She had six living brothers and sisters, I don’t know how many aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews. They had a wedding here last year and she must have had a hundred relatives alone. They’re all gone, every one of them.”

“That’s awful,” Chloe said. “We lost my mom and my little brother, you know. Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“It’s all right,” Barnes said. “My situation is almost as bad as Loretta’s, only on a smaller scale. Of course it’s not small for me. Let me tell you my story.” As soon as he began with seemingly innocuous details, his voice grew thick and quiet. “I was in bed with my wife. She was sleeping. I was reading. Our children had been down for a couple of hours. They were five, three, and one. The oldest was a girl, the other two boys. That was normal for us, me reading while my wife slept. She worked so hard with the kids and a part-time job that she was always knocked out by nine or so.

“I was reading a sports magazine, trying to turn the pages quietly, and every once in a while she would sigh. Once she even asked how much longer I would be. I knew I should go in the other room or just turn the light off and try to sleep myself. But I told her, ‘Not long,’ hoping she’d fall asleep and I could just read the whole magazine. I can usually tell by her breathing if she’s sleeping soundly enough that my light doesn’t bother her. And after a while I heard that deep breathing.

“I was glad. My plan was to read till midnight. I was propped up on an elbow with my back to her, using a pillow to shield the light a little. I don’t know how much longer I had been reading when I felt the bed move and sensed she had gotten up. I assumed she was going to the bathroom and only hoped she didn’t wake up to the point where she’d bug me about still having the light on when she got back. She’s a tiny little thing, and it didn’t hit me that I didn’t hear her walk to the bathroom. But, like I say, I was engrossed in my reading.

“After a few more minutes I called out, ‘Hon, you OK?’ And I didn’t hear anything. I began wondering, was it just my imagination that she had gotten up? I reached behind me and she was not there, so I called out again. I thought maybe she was checking on the kids, but usually she’s such a sound sleeper that unless she’s heard one of them she doesn’t do that.

“Well, probably another minute or two went by before I turned over and noticed that she was not only gone, but that it also appeared she had pulled the sheet and covers back up toward her pillow. Now you can imagine what I thought. I thought she was so frustrated at me for still reading that she had given up waiting for me to turn off the light and decided to go sleep on the couch. I’m a fairly decent husband, so I went out to apologize and bring her back to bed.

“You know what happened. She wasn’t out on the couch. She wasn’t in the bathroom. I poked my head into each of the kids’ rooms and whispered for her, thinking maybe she was rocking one of them or sitting in there. Nothing. The lights were off all over the house, except for my bedside. I didn’t want to wake the kids by yelling for her, so I just turned on the hall light and checked their rooms again.

“I’m ashamed to say I still didn’t have a clue until I noticed my oldest two kids weren’t in their beds. My first thought was that they had gone into the baby’s room, like they do sometimes, to sleep on the floor. Then I thought my wife had taken one or both of them to the kitchen for something. Frankly I was just a little perturbed that I didn’t know what was going on in the middle of the night.

“When the baby was not in his crib, I turned the light on, stuck my head out the door and called down the hall for my wife. No answer. Then I noticed the baby’s footie pajamas in the crib, and I knew. I just knew. It hit me all of a sudden. I ran from room to room, pulling back the covers and finding the kids’ pajamas. I didn’t want to, but I tore the cover back from my wife’s side of the bed and there was her nightgown, her rings, and even her hair clips on the pillow.”

Rayford was fighting the tears, remembering his own similar experience. Barnes took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his eyes. “Well, I started phoning around,” he said. “I started with the pastor, but of course I got his answering machine. A couple of other places I got answering machines, too, so I grabbed the church directory and started looking up older folks, the people I thought might not like answering machines and wouldn’t have one. I let their phones ring off the hook. No answers.

“Of course I knew it was unlikely I’d find anybody. For some reason I ran out and jumped in my car and raced over here to the church. There was Loretta, sitting in her car in her robe, hair up in curlers, crying her eyes out. We came into the foyer and sat by the potted plants, crying and holding each other, knowing exactly what had happened. Within about half an hour, a few others showed up. We basically commiserated and wondered aloud what we were supposed to do next. Then somebody remembered Pastor’s Rapture tape.”

“His what?” Chloe asked.

“Our senior pastor loved to preach about the coming of Christ to rapture his church, to take believers, dead and alive, to heaven before a period of tribulation on the earth. He was particularly inspired once a couple of years ago.”

Rayford turned to Chloe. “You remember your mother talking about that. She was so enthusiastic about it.”

“Oh yeah, I do.”

“Well,” Barnes said, “the pastor used that sermon and had himself videotaped in this office speaking directly to people who were. He put it in the church library with instructions to get it out and play it if most everyone seemed to have disappeared. We all watched it a couple of times the other night. A few people wanted to argue with God, trying to tell us that they really had been believers and should have been taken with the others, but we all knew the truth. We had been phony. There wasn’t a one of us who didn’t know what it meant to be a true Christian. We knew we weren’t and that we had been.”

Rayford had trouble speaking, but he had to ask. “Mr. Barnes, you were on the staff here.”

“Right.”

“How did you miss it?”

“I’m going to tell you, Ray, because I no longer have anything to hide. I’m ashamed of myself, and if I never really had the desire or the motivation to tell others about Christ before, I sure have it now. I just feel awful that it took the most cataclysmic event in history to reach me. I was raised in the church. My parents and brothers and sisters were all Christians.

“I loved church. It was my life, my culture. I thought I believed everything there was to believe in the Bible. The Bible says that if you believe in Christ you have eternal life, so I assumed I was covered.

“I especially liked the parts about God being forgiving. I was a sinner, and I never changed. I just kept getting forgiveness because I thought God was bound to do that. He had to. Verses that said if we confessed our sins he was faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us. I knew other verses said you had to believe and receive, to trust and to abide, but to me that was sort of theological mumbo jumbo. I wanted the bottom line, the easiest route, the simplest path. I knew other verses said that we are not to continue in sin just because God shows grace.”

“I thought I had a great life. I even went to Bible college. In church and at school, I said the right things and prayed in public and even encouraged people in their Christian lives. But I was still a sinner. I even said that. I told people I wasn’t perfect; I was forgiven.”

“My wife said that,” Rayford said.

“The difference is,” Bruce said, “she was sincere. I lied. I told my wife that we tithed to the church, you know, that we gave ten percent of our income. I hardly ever gave any, except when the plate was passed I might drop in a few bills to make it look good. Every week I would confess that to God, promising to do better next time.

“I encouraged people to share their faith, to tell other people how to become Christians. But on my own I never did that. My job was to visit people in their homes and nursing homes and hospitals every day. I was good at it. I encouraged them, smiled at them, talked with them, prayed with them, even read Scripture to them. But I never did that on my own, privately.

“I was lazy. I cut corners. When people thought I was out calling, I might be at a movie in another town. I was also lustful. I read things I shouldn’t have read, looked at magazines that fed my lusts.”

Rayford winced. That hit too close to home.

“I had a real racket going,” Barnes was saying, “and I bought into it. Down deep, way down deep, I knew better. I knew it was too good to be true. I knew that true Christians were known by what their lives produced and that I was producing nothing. But I comforted myself that there were worse people around who called themselves Christians.

“I wasn’t a rapist or a child molester or an adulterer, though many times I felt unfaithful to my wife because of my lusts. But I could always pray and confess and feel as though I was clean. It should have been obvious to me. When people found out I was on the pastoral staff at New Hope, I would tell them about the cool pastor and the neat church, but I was shy about telling them about Christ. If they challenged me and asked if New Hope was one of those churches that said Jesus was the only way to God, I did everything but deny it. I wanted them to think I was OK, that I was with it. I may be a Christian and even a pastor, but don’t lump me with the weirdos. Above all, don’t do that.

“I see now, of course, that God is a sin-forgiving God, because we’re human and we need that. But we are to receive his gift, abide in Christ, and allow him to live through us. I used what I thought was my security as a license to do what I wanted. I could basically live in sin and pretend to be devout. I had a great family and a nice work environment. And as miserable as I was privately most of the time, I really believed I would go to heaven when I died.

“I hardly ever read my Bible except when preparing a talk or lesson. I didn’t have the ‘mind of Christ.’ Christian, I knew vaguely, means ‘Christ one’ or ‘one like Christ.’ That sure wasn’t me, and I found out in the worst way possible.

“Let me just say to you both this is your decision.

“These are your lives. But I know, and Loretta knows, and a few others who were playing around the edges here at this church know exactly what happened a few nights ago. Jesus Christ returned for his true family, and the rest of us were.”

Bruce looked Chloe in the eyes. “There is no doubt in my mind that we have witnessed the Rapture. My biggest fear, once I realized the truth, was that there was no more hope for me. I had missed it, I had been a phony, I had set up my own brand of Christianity that may have made for a life of freedom but had cost me my soul. I had heard people say that when the church was raptured, God’s Spirit would be gone from the earth. The logic was that when Jesus went to heaven after his resurrection, the Holy Spirit that God gave to the church was embodied in believers. So when they were taken, the Spirit would be gone, and there would be no more hope for anyone left. You can’t know the relief when Pastor’s tape showed me otherwise.

“We realize how stupid we were, but those of us in this church—at least the ones who felt drawn to this building the night everyone else disappeared—are now as zealous as we can be. No one who comes here will leave without knowing exactly what we believe and what we think is necessary for them to have a relationship with God.”

Chloe stood and paced, her arms folded across her chest. “That’s a pretty interesting story,” she said. “What was the deal with Loretta? How did she miss it if her whole extended family were true Christians?”

“You should have her tell you sometime,” Bruce said. “But she tells me it was pride and embarrassment that kept her from Christ. She was a middle child in a very religious family, and she said she was in her late teens before she even thought seriously about her personal faith. She had just drifted along with the family to church and all the related activities. As she grew up, got married, became a mother and a grandmother, she just let everyone assume she was a spiritual giant. She was revered around here. Only she had never believed and received Christ for herself.”