There we were, souls and bodies packed into a Texas church on the last night of our lives.
Packed into a room just like this, but with creaky wooden pews draped in worn-down red fabric, with an organ to my left and a choir at my back and a baptism pool built into the wall behind them.
A room like this, nonetheless.
With the same great feelings of suspense, the same deep hopes for salvation, the same sweat in the palms and the same people in the back not paying attention.
This was December 31,1999, the night of the Second Coming of Christ, and the end of the world as I knew it.
I turned 12 that year and reached the age of accountability.
And once I stopped complaining about how unfair it was that Jesus would return as soon as I had to be accountable for all that I had done, I figured I had better get my house in order very quickly.
So I went to church as often as I could. I listened for silence as anxiously as one might listen for noise, trying to be sure that the Lord hadn't pulled a fast one on me and decided to come back early.
And just in case he did, I built a backup plan, by reading the "Left Behind" books that were all the rage at the time.
And I found in their pages that if I was not taken in the rapture at midnight, I had another shot.
All I had to do was avoid taking the mark of the beast, fight off demons, plagues and the Antichrist himself.
It would be hard --but I knew I could do it.
