Apocalypse Now

When I was in the sixth grade I saw this movie:As a result, I have spent the last 18 years avoiding any discussion of the end times, lawn mowers and the final twenty-two chapters of the Bible. If you actually saw this movie in the 70's when it was produced or anytime after you became an adult, you might have had a broader context to understand it stylistically and philosophically. I was eleven - and paradoxically becoming obsessed with both my appearance and my ultimate fate. (I've since learned I was right on track developmentally.)

And so I would lay in bed at night quaking with fear over the state of my bangs and if the world was going to end before I made it to seventh grade. Behold: a piece of my spiritual baggage - it fits, just like yours, on the luggage rack next to family baggage and emotional baggage. And left un-confronted it has traveled with me even into parenthood. One night I found myself singing "This Little Light of Mine" with my preschooler and realized that I never sing the verse about Jesus coming back... you know, because I don't want to scare her. Why should that scare her? Because it still scares me.

WHAT is this? Has the Year of Slow become the Year of Confronting My Fears of the Apocalypse? I had no intention of this until I sat in a room full of people this morning listening to this dear Texan:
Oh Beth - why isn't there a decent picture of you on Wikipedia? Your hair is AMAZING. And this tiny picture does it no justice...If you know Beth Moore, I need not say anything. If you don't. You should. Can I get an amen? She is in one sense every evangelical stereotype - southern, big hair, passionate, gendered,absolute, waves her Bible and makes sweeping hand gestures. She creates so much material for this cynic to go to town...until I sit in one of her studies. And I open up my Bible and I fight tears because somehow someway I am learning that I am loved recklessly and called to greatness in the scary last twenty-two chapters.

And so B. Moore in the next ten weeks take me into the fire. Only you can pack the house in a study on Revelation - and you are just on a screen. Remind me that this part is the same as the others - a story about He who was and is and is to come. Even more, I dare to hope that if I can push past the fear, there's something new to be learned here - a picture of His love for this world and a perspective on being "chosen, called, and faithful" (Rev.17:14) that I couldn't learn anywhere else.