Rapture Anxiety

When I was 12 years old, after soccer practice, a friend’s parents dropped me off at home one Saturday afternoon. I fully expected someone to be home, given the fact that we had a very large family — I was the youngest in the family, with 5 sisters. But nobody was home, and they hadn’t left a note as to where they had gone, which was a bit unusual. Given that these were the late 1970s, and there was no such thing as smart phones, there was no way to reach any of my family members to find out where they were.

On the face of it, for a 12-year-old boy coming home to an empty house on a Saturday afternoon, one would look at that event from an objective point of view and consider that this sudden chance at a few hours’ freedom would be every kid’s dream! Party time! I could watch whatever I wanted to on the TV, listen to whatever radio station I wanted to, or grab a meal-spoiling snack before dinner. And for most 12-year olds with the house all to themselves, it surely would be a golden opportunity to chill out.

But none of these fun things to do were on my mind at the time. First of all, because we lived in a fundamentalist Christian home, with parents who subscribed to the Bill Gothard model of parenting and child-rearing, we had no TV in the house. This was to protect us from the evils of the world. Second, we also were not allowed to listen to secular music of any kind; if we were caught…