“The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world … Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred in 1945)

If you spend a few minutes searching YouTube for doomsday preppers, you’ll find everything from the sensible to the bizarre—or frankly frightening. Tips on gardening, first aid, canning, storage, and survival skills abound, along with weaponry training, hiding tactics, and bunker tours (but WHY WOULD YOU NEED A BODY CHUTE, KEVIN?). No, we are not living in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games; this is how real people around the country are readying themselves.

I originally intended for this to be a stand-alone post, but once the words started flowing, I discovered how much I wanted to cover… so prepare yourself for a cliff-hanger at the end and a continuation next week.

“Rayford Steele’s mind was on a woman he had never touched.” Thus begins the Left Behind series that debuted (can you believe it?) 25 years ago.

The saga created plenty of buzz in Christian circles when it first hit bookstores. People who had previously shied away from prophetic passages in Scripture now gobbled them up (with just as much confusion as before, but with heightened appetite). Many found themselves pondering terms like rapture, tribulation, and millennial reign for the first time. We might not have known we were taking a course in eschatology, but our basic framework for the unfolding of final events was being built page by page.