Left Behind: Chapter Eleven

The action

Ray leaves the house! Ray and Chloe drive to New Hope church and meet with acting pastor Bruce Barnes.

Dramatis Personae, novum:

Loretta: As per the enlightened tradition of the Left Behind Series, Loretta needs no surname. It is enough to know she's "an older woman" who looks "sunken eyed and disheveled, as if she'd come through a war .... She's the only person in her whole clan who is still here .... They're all gone, every one of them."

The chivalrous impulse

Pastor Barnes, making small talk with Ray and Chloe, tells them "[f]olks, Loretta there looks like I feel."

The litany of complaint

Bruce Barnes relates his tale of sub par Christianity, replete with confessions of having "read things I shouldn't have read, looked at magazines that fed my lusts."

Bruce lays it all out

"There is no doubt in my mind that we have witnessed the Rapture .... I had heard people say that when the church was raptured, [g]od's [s]pirit 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."

But Bruce, is there hope? Is there any reason for this series to continue for 16 more volumes?

"[S]omebody remembered Pastor's Rapture tape .... You can't know [my] relief when Pastor's tape showed me otherwise .... 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 .... the pastor used that sermon and ... videotaped [himself] ... speaking directly to people who were left behind [and] put it in the church library with instructions to get it out and play it if most everyone seemed to have disappeared."

Will Ray and Chloe make the leap of faith?

"'No?' Bruce was clearly surprised. 'Need more time?' .... '[L]et me leave you with one little reminder of urgency ... people die every day in ... plane crashes -- oh, sorry, I'm sure you're a good pilot.'"

Ray "appreciate[s] your time and ... will watch the tape."

The takeaway

I am pretty disappointed in the quality of salvation denying sinning thus far. End of times riots of passion shouldn't be about pudgy pastors sweatily thumbing through dirty magazines. My imagination wants this.

Previous posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10
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