The Rapture: In The Twinkling Of An Eye (19 page)

“Everyone here shall receive praise for receiving the gift of salvation through God’s Son, Jesus the Christ. Those who have served Christ will be honored, for as the Son Himself has proclaimed, “If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honor.”

“And those who have suffered for the sake of Christ and the gospel will be glorified. So, beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which tried you, as though some strange thing happened to you; but rejoice to the extent that you partook of Christ’s sufferings, so that now that His glory has been revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. If you were reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you and through you He is glorified.

“The time has come for judgment to begin here at the house of God.Therefore let those who suffered according to the will of God and yet committed their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator, be commended by Him whom they served.” Peter returned to his place and prostrated himself before the throne.

Next the voice of God began to praise all believers for their faith. Again, though Irene had been taught that this would take place and had felt this attention and honor since the moment of her arrival, it struck her as bizarre even as it warmed her beyond measure.

She knew that if God gave every redeemed saint even ten seconds of praise, it would take thousands of Earth years. So when Irene was addressed by Him personally, she knew that everyone else was getting their commendation at the same time.

“Irene,” He spoke audibly to her heart, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. You believed in My Son and followed Him, despite opposition within your own family. Though you have belonged to Me only a short time, you have been faithful in studying My Word, in teaching it to children, in leading your in-laws and your own son to Christ. From the time of your salvation, your concern has been not for yourself, but for others. I love you and welcome you home. Well done, good and faithful servant.”

The words of God from His own mouth humbled Irene so much that she could no longer stand. Enraptured as she was, all she could think of was her shortcomings, the times she had failed God and how puny her service had been in the short time she’d had to offer, especially compared to so many of those around her. Just this brief moment with her God gave Irene a whole new view of her temporal life and what a waste it now seemed in light of eternity. She had heard the quote “Only one life ‘twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last,” but how true and real it was to her now. What had all the rest of that busyness been about? It amounted to less than nothing in the cosmic scheme.

Irene had been praised for receiving Christ and honored for a bit of service: teaching Sunday school and leading three others to Him. But there was another category of blessing for which she knew she was not qualified. Yet it buoyed her to see others glorified for having suffered for the sake of Christ and the gospel.

Countless thousands were brought before Jesus and honored for years and years of service in various capacities, and this was when Irene realized the truth of the adage that “the last will be first and the first last” in heaven. Irene looked forward to seeing and hearing about the exploits of all the heroes of the Bible and leaders of the church throughout history, but clearly they were at the other end of the godly schedule. For as God praised the saints, He began with the behind-the-scenes people, the lesser knowns, those unrecognized outside their own small orbits.

There was the woman from Indiana who had raised four sons in spite of an alcoholic husband who abused her. She had continued to pray for him, protect her sons, and work to provide for them all. While she had refused to be walked on and injured by this man, she treated him as a lost soul and not as an enemy, and God honored her for that example to her sons. Under her tutelage and Bible teaching, all four became excellent students, graduated from seminaries, and went into full-time Christian work. The adult Sunday school class she taught grew to more than seven hundred members.

Another honoree was a prodigious pianist who had taken the gift God had given him and devoted himself to ministry rather than exalt himself by pursuing what was guaranteed to be a lucrative career in the great concert halls. He taught piano in remote areas of the world and used his giftedness to spread the Word of God, eschewing personal glory and wealth.

On and on they paraded by the throne, receiving honor from the Lamb who had been slain for the sins of the world. As Jesus embraced them and spoke to them, Irene could hear and see it all as if she were in the front row. And it was as if time stood still. She felt no passage of minutes or hours, experienced no fatigue or restlessness or impatience. If this went on for the rest of eternity, it would have been fine with her. She was exposed to heroes of the faith she had never even heard of, and they proved to be quiet, unassuming giants.

Through sheer force of his own will and personality, Abdullah Smith had wrestled his decimated life back to some semblance of normalcy. For many, many months he laid low at the Amman air base, not making it obvious that he still lived there, though he had been divorced for so long. His ex-wife, Yasmine, still lived in their modest home with their son and daughter, and Abdullah had cleaned himself up enough that she allowed brief visits every couple of weeks or so.

He had quit drinking, quit chasing women, quit being slothful, and returned to his old disciplined ways with the Royal Jordanian Air Force. Abdullah was always the first one up and on the job in a crisp, shining uniform. He regained his sense of class and purpose and style, but, sad to say, his old personality seemed lost forever.

He had always been a man of few words while bearing the ability to be quick-witted and pleasant. Now his professionalism and leadership in the cockpit had returned, but he was largely a sullen, silent man. Wounded was how he would have put it. With the loss of his wife and children, he was devastated.

And it was obvious that this was not going to change. He and Yasmine still traded letters occasionally, but it was nearly impossible for him to remain civil in his, always moving from desperate lovelorn pleas to get back together to rants and raves about her infidelity to Islam and her treachery in “stealing” his own children. Yet it was Abdullah who was not devout in his faith, and it had been he who initiated the divorce. That made everything worse; he had no one to blame but himself. Yes, she had turned her back on her religion, but he had intended to make her pay. He was the one, however, who was now suffering.

Abdullah had, as usual, been up since the crack of dawn on the fateful day that changed the world. He had already eaten and begun his round of preflight training chores when the warning sirens sounded and military personnel were rallied from all over the base. He’d seen enough similar drills, so he never even asked what was going on. He just assumed it was a routine test and that he would be expected to muster next to his fighter plane until the thing was called off.

Instead, he and several colleagues were marshaled to take off and defend the skies of Jordan. Against who or what, no one could or would say. But as Abdullah’s fighter screamed into the air over Amman, his view of the carnage on the ground horrified him. What could have caused this on such a beautiful, sunny, cloudless day?

He stared at hopeless rush-hour traffic jams—nothing new except for the number of smoking and burning accidents and the fact that nothing was moving. Helicopters were the only craft able to get on and off the main roads, carting the most seriously injured to overtaxed hospitals.

“What in the world has happened?” Abdullah cried into his radio.

But his dispatcher was so harried that he merely responded, “Find the news on the radio. Everyone’s carrying it.”

Abdullah had always been one who knew the difference between his dreams and reality. He had never had to pinch himself to determine whether he was awake. For the first time ever, he was not so sure. To hear the frantic reports of the disappearances of people in Jordan, the rest of the Middle East, Europe, Asia, even his beloved America, was almost too much to take in. People had disappeared, disintegrated, dematerialized-- whatever one could call it--right out of their clothes, regardless of where they were or what they were doing.

Pots boiled over and started fires that were burning homes and apartment buildings. Driverless cars careened into trucks, buses, other cars, bridges, and abutments, resulting in the mess Abdullah saw below. Doctors had disappeared during operations, instruments falling into body cavities, colleagues collapsing in horror.

A baby had disappeared while being born. A nurse’s uniform had floated to the floor. An entire soccer team, save for one hysterical teammate, left their uniforms, shoes, and socks on the field as the ball trickled out-of-

bounds. Stories like this poured in from all around the world.

Something niggled at the back of Abdullah’s brain, but it didn’t hit him full force until panicky commentators-- usually so all knowing and aloof--began speculating on the various theories. Radiation. Spontaneous combustion that somehow eluded clothing and jewelry. An entirely new form of weaponry. Or the old religious saws: the end of the world. The Rapture.

Not many seriously considered that one, but it had to be raised because nobody had a better idea. And as it gathered steam, supporters and detractors called in with what they had heard and learned over the years from the few kooks who believed such things.

Abdullah shuddered. Yasmine had warned him of this. She had spelled it out plainly in one of the letters that had so enraged him. And he was certain it was one he had not destroyed.

He had wanted to shred and burn it, had meant to. He had balled it up and thrown it across the room because it also contained the step-by-step instructions for becoming a follower of Christ. But if memory served, this was one of the letters he had smoothed back out and put in his metal lockbox. Now he was desperate to check it again, because if she had been right and this was what he feared, she and the children were gone.

Had Irene Steele been forced from her reverie—impossible, of course, in the very presence of God—and asked her most stark impression of heaven so far, she would have had to admit that most jarring was her new concept of time. On Earth she had been in an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly cycle sometimes carved into semesters or trimesters or even gestation periods. She was aware of interminable dark winter months, the elusive spring, and flashbulb summers she couldn’t make linger.

But here... here it was so different. She simply could not put a clock on how long it had been since she had been awakened from a deep sleep and delivered to the portals of heaven. So much had happened that she could have been here an hour or a week or--who knew?-- longer.

Yet it seemed like an instant. She had been told that time would have no meaning in the light of eternity, and she had to chuckle to recall what she once thought that meant. Perhaps she would set up whatever kind of housekeeping one set up in glory, visit Jesus, talk to God, meet friends and biblical saints, see the sights, and then settle in, realizing she had a long, long time ahead of her.

She had not, however, expected time to simply have no bearing. Irene had zero sense of the passage of time, and only in those fleeting moments when she wondered what was going on on Earth did she think about what might have happened between the shout, the trumpet sound, and right now.

She could only imagine the chaos below. What Rayford and Chloe were thinking. Whether they were reunited. Were communication and travel impossible? How long would it take them to remember what she and Raymie had talked of, warned them about? In one sense, she thought, this should be easy for them. They had not believed, but now what could they think? Would it be obvious to anyone who had had exposure to believers that, as crazy as it had all sounded, clearly what their friends, loved ones, and acquaintances had predicted had come true?

Everything about this place, needless to say, constituted sensory overload, and Irene realized that her mind had to be as new as her glorified body. Otherwise, how could she manage to take it all in? Things like this happening on Earth would have either driven her mad or made her pass out from their sheer implausibility.

This ability to move about at the speed of thought, to understand what was going on without being told, to communicate with people and, best of all, with God instantaneously, almost without a back and forth. She wondered and knew at the same time.

The “leaders” of this massive meeting did not step to a microphone and announce the program or introduce the participants. They spoke to the hearts and ears and minds of everyone all at once, and you simply knew. God had honored His Son, of course, and His voice was unmistakable, but it wasn’t as if anyone assembled in the house of God wondered who sat on the throne.

Irene sat enthralled, unaware of the weight of her body on a chair, with no feeling of fatigue or ache or pain or that charming memory: time. Impatience was not an issue. Boredom she could never imagine again. Heartache and loss were strange, muted, overwhelmed in the presence of her Savior. She was still concerned about her family, but something--actually Someone-- had embedded into her new mind and body a deep sense of contentment and peace that told her she had no part in that which was to come as it related to Rayford and Chloe. Still she prayed for them and somehow believed without question that God knew best and that His will would be done.

Seemingly from nowhere, a translucent podium appeared some thirty feet to the left of the throne, emitting from its center a piercing flame so white and bright that all Irene could compare it to was the flash of burning magnesium from a high school experiment. That had required that students wear welding masks to protect their eyes, but she was able to gaze at this great light without danger and sense its powerful, incomparable heat. Something told her that in her mortal body she would not have been able to stand within twenty feet of it.