Rings true with my heart: How Diapers & Dishes Will Change the World

This is an excellent article published by American Vision.
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I used to be a useless Christian. My bad end-times beliefs not only terrified me, but completely immobilized and retarded my spiritual life. Bible classes at my private school encouraged our imaginations to run wild, and what started out as a pre-teen fascination and curiosity in Biblical prophecy soon turned into an intense phobia. Youth-group films that illustrated our bizarre ideas only inflated our fears. Our teachers never applied systematic theology; in fact, we never even opened a Bible. Just pure scare tactics from the good ol’ Fire and Life Insurance Agency. For me this turned into a life altering fear.

I never dreamed fear could grow roots like it did. By the time I was a teenager I was afraid to listen to the news or read the newspaper for fear that I would see more “signs” of the “end.” I became afraid of technology. I was afraid of barcodes (I was told these were the mark of the beast). I couldn’t watch movies that were “futuristic” or apocalyptic in nature. I became so fearful that I had a hard time enjoying life at all. Sunny days were gloomy to me as everything reminded me of my impending doom. This fear was a weed and the roots had grown so long and deep that they became entangled in every part of my life. When I tried to pull it out, it would break and grow back later.

I was aware of what an eschatological belief could do. A lot of other Christians I knew weren’t as afraid as me—some of them believed in the rapture. They welcomed the bad news and rejoiced in the evil condition of the world because it meant that we would get whipped out of here faster. However, my church taught that Christians were most likely going to go through this terrifying “tribulation” where we would deal with the persecution of “the Antichrist” and most of us would wind up dead or wishing we were.

By the time I got married I was finally starting to vocalize this fear. A year later when we had our first child and brought him home from the hospital I should have felt pure joy. Instead I felt tremendous guilt and sorrow. How could we be so cruel as to have a child who would have to endure this future tribulation? The world was so evil and it would only get worse—if the rapture wasn’t real our poor child would have to deal with the Antichrist. I was a brand new mom and felt as though I had already failed. This might sound silly to some, but it was very real for me.

I was pregnant with our second child when I was given two books that changed my life: Last Days Madness, by Gary DeMar, and Paradise Restored, by the late David Chilton. My fear had grown so bad that just reading the chapter titles gave me waves of adrenaline. However, I made myself read one page at a time, one scripture at a time. I started to realize immediately the power that was over me for so long: lack of biblical education and bad theology. Could it be as simple as that? I read on and slowly one chain broke after another. I can honestly say as a lifelong Christian I had never been free until I understood eschatology (the study of “last things”) in its proper form. After those books I moved on to the Basic Training DVD series that helped me to really understand the standard for biblical interpretation. With so many years of thinking “the end” was in my future I had developed some real triggers, some that I still deal with today but am able to neutralize almost immediately by applying proper hermeneutics.

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