Dear Deb
Dear Teenage Deb,
Coming of age in the 1970s, you sometimes marvel at the inconceivable notion of one day living in the twenty-first century, of being forty-three (ancient!), when chimes clang and horns blare, welcoming a fresh numeral on humanity’s odometer. However, you also doubt the probability of living to the year 2000, since the Rapture is bound to occur at any moment. This 2021 missive confirms that you have remained unRaptured. It also assures you that you’ll live considerably beyond forty-three—to sixty-four, at least—the age your grandmother was when you married at nineteen. And that’s why I write you at this age: to reflect on who you are and the choices you will make while standing at adulthood’s threshold. To let you know that very little will unfold as you expect. And that you may spend the rest of your life trying to transcend everything in which you currently place your trust.
As a teenager in a conservative California county, you cannot escape the message that the End Times are imminent. Your red-faced, toupee-wearing Pentecostal preacher harps on it three times a week. Sometimes, while shouting about believers—both dead and alive—being swooped into the clouds to join Jesus, Brother Brewer raises both arms straight into the air. Tears run down his face as he shouts, “Glory!” and much of the congregation follows suit. Some Saturday nights, you visit the cool Jesus-people church, filled with T-shirted, flip-flop-wearing long-hairs. The fatherly pastor and the bearded boys in the worship-rock bands have one chief proclamation: Jesus is coming at any moment, like a thief in the night. The Late Great Planet Earth is the bestselling “nonfiction” book of the 1970s and includes assertions that the Antichrist is currently alive on Earth, just waiting to step into power once Jesus has Raptured true believers. These teachers claim the Antichrist is likely European, prompting some folks to devise elaborate alphabetical systems by which they compute the letters of certain people’s names (Henry Kissinger or Pope Paul VI, for example) to total 666, the Mark of the Beast. Every political headline and natural disaster attest that Biblical prophecy is unfolding. By applying special math to their interpretations of a Bible they believe is literal and infallible, the author and these preachers you revere insist that Jesus will show up in the late 70s, the 80s at the latest.
The churches that purport these Last Days warnings include an additional toxic ingredient, ratcheting up the heat: Just because you are currently saved, they say, that’s no guarantee you’ll be Raptured. A person can backslide or even lose their salvation as their unconfessed sins accumulate. Even though these preachers cannot quantify the specific thoughts and behaviors that place you at risk of damnation, they insist a boundary line exists between Saved and Doomed. Nothing is worse than being left behind, especially when the consequences include living through a seven-year Tribulation on Earth, followed by an eternity of unquenchable fire. To avoid finding yourself shit outta luck when an angel sounds the Rapture trumpet, you speculate about the calculations God might apply in His secret unrighteousness formula. When it comes to verbal sins, do ten “shits” equal one “fuck” (which you know must be a real dealbreaker)? When it comes to bodily sins, you know He disapproves of unmarried, hetero, penis-in-vagina fornication, but does He divert His eyes from everything leading up to it? In God’s economy, do five orals equal one penis-in-vagina intercourse? (Probably more like two or three orals, you reason.) These unanswerable questions instigate numerous trips to the altar where you drop to your knees, sobbing and begging Jesus to forgive you, securing your righteous standing for several hours or even a day or two. Sometimes, following a particularly detailed erotic fantasy or a steamy make-out session, you lie awake, tears soaking your rose-strewn pillowcase, recounting your sins in coded language, hoping that God does not require specificity: “Please, God, if I’m no longer saved, please save me now.” Always, you promise it will never happen again.
With your eternal status so precarious, you make two brief, Earthly goals, to be attained before Jesus snatches you away:
Get married so you don’t miss out on the bliss of God-sanctioned intercourse.
Have children because this is a woman’s highest calling.
Your goals clearly defined, you date one young man after another, each an unwitting candidate for marriage. Your list of husband-criterion is even shorter than your goals-list:
He’s got to be saved.
Here are some questions I’d ask your nineteen-year-old self:
From whom or what do you really need saving?
Is it possible that you should actually trust yourself rather than ignoring/stifling that internal voice that sometimes nudges you?
If you knew for certain that Jesus wasn’t coming, what would you do instead of waiting for Him?
But guess what, Teenage Deb? You would answer all these questions with Bible verses and sermon scraps because you have swallowed the notion that you are evil and untrustworthy and that the clock is running out. Even if you knew with a certainty that forty-five years from now, Jesus would still be a no-show, at nineteen, you have developed an insatiable craving for paternalistic messengers. Whether it’s Brother Brewer, Pastor Chuck, Hal Lindsey, Old Testament prophets, John the Revelator, or Cat Stevens, you believe that everything outside your church walls is a wild world from which you need masculine intervention.
By nineteen, you reject the possibility that there is not a binary solution or formula for every situation. Several months ago, you tried college for two weeks, even though you knew, as a future resident of Heaven, you’d never need higher education. When the sociology professor declared, “There is no absolute truth,” you felt like you’d been walloped by a galactic boulder. You drove off campus that day, renouncing godless philosophies. To pursue an education would mean giving secular people the power to drag you into Hell alongside them. Certitude is a security blanket that enshrouds you from reality. It is crocheted with platitudes that allow you to muffle ideas that challenge your beliefs. It will be decades before you understand that certitude and faith are oppositional.
At nineteen, you cleave to the semblance of fairy tales, both Earthly and Heavenly. Of a handsome prince saving you with his love, of a benevolent Savior rescuing you from Hellfire. Surrendering these fantasies would mean looking to yourself for salvation, making a plan for your life, one that relies on your own intellect, capabilities, and fortitude—traits you do not recognize in yourself. Abandoning these beliefs might also result in ostracism from three maternal generations who would take your denouncement personally. To you, this would feel very much like being left behind.
In other words, based on who you are and what you need when you are merely nineteen, the following must play out like a prophecy:
Several months after committing to your short-term goals, you’ll stand before a packed church house, promising a near-stranger to love and stay with him till death or Jesus, whichever comes first. Over the next decade, you’ll trade Pentecostalism for evangelical megachurches. Now that you’re in your thirties with three children, you’d be pretty stoked if the Rapture would rescue you from the life you’ve helped fashion. Turns out marrying while under the influence of hormones and spiritual terrorism is not a surefire recipe for happiness. But divorce is pretty high on God’s shit-list, too, so to offset your reality, you’ll become a zealot, adopting a vocabulary that includes phrases such as, “Being happy is not the purpose of life.” Like an ascetic, you’ll insist that you need little emotional food to survive, that love is a carnal pursuit. Your fear of being left behind is subsumed in a desire to belong, so you’ll invest your time and energy banding with other believers to promote God’s Word and to fight evil causes and people. You’ll sustain this ruse into your mid-forties, imposing your perverse theology on anyone who will listen.
The final half of your marriage will be marked by episodes of debilitating anxiety and depression, yet you will wear your suffering like a martyr’s crown. Like your teenage self, you’ll cry into your pillow, begging God to save you but not from Hell. On your worst days, you’ll fantasize about ways you might die without having to take responsibility for it. After a series of events that suggest the Bible does not have an easy answer for everything, divorce will finally come, a merciful euthanasia. But your divorce from the church—from Jesus and most of your friends—will be far more traumatizing and enduring.
Years later, bereft of religious convictions, you’ll park outside the tiny church where your indoctrination was cemented, where the threat of Hell and being left behind were made as real as the house you lived in. You’ll wonder how this tiny, moldering building that sits on so little real estate wielded so much influence in your life; how this site, so inconsequential, even within its own city limits, became, to you, as central as Vatican City is to millions of Catholics around the world. You’ll imagine your teenage self, standing on the front steps, surrounded by other teens, after a particularly rousing church service, flirting, making innuendos, always pushing the boundaries while trying to stay behind ambiguous lines. Almost every member of your youth group married in their teens or early twenties. How eagerly all of us, under duress, exchanged our blithe adolescence for authorized sex, for the relentless burdens of adulthood. The absurdity of it all.
Years after extricating yourself from evangelicalism, you will be haunted by the oppressive “if only,” wondering what might have been. You will want to blame others for their complicity. But ultimately, you must acknowledge that, young as you were, you made your own choices. Forgiving yourself, in contrast to excoriating your way to the grave, may become your greatest challenge, for you will have generated a lot of fallout; your victims include your children, their father, and many women you mentored and probably misled. These may be sins for which there is no absolution, but if you wish to heal, you must accept that regret, and what-iffing will never bring about rectification.
Here are some questions I ask your sixty-four-year-old self:
Perhaps this tendency to enumerate your sins is a religious habit worth relinquishing?
What if you reframed your narrative to explain that this variety of faith once promised you everything you needed and wanted?
What if you allowed that you could have made even worse choices?
To answer these questions, you will look down at the tattoo on your creping forearm, where its message declares a different type of Good News: “The life you save may be your own,” it says. You will acknowledge that you did it, you saved yourself, the only person you could save. And you will whisper a prayer of thanks to Anyone Else Who might be listening, just in case.
With love and mercy,
Your future self, now old enough to be your grandmother
-Deborah Paige
Deborah Paige teaches community college in Southern California. She writes CNF and dabbles in fiction while mostly ignoring the solid writing advice she doles out to her students. Find her on Twitter @mspaigefullcoll