Tribulation House: Reloaded

Chapter 38

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- 38 -

I know for sure that I had set my alarm for bright and early October 16—5:51 AM, in fact, to give me a full twenty-four hours—but something must have gone wrong. Maybe I hit the snooze alarm. Or accidentally shut it off altogether.

All I know is it was October 16 and it was suddenly almost 11 AM. Blinking myself to consciousness, wiping the sleep out of my eyes, I yelled for the wife. “Honey! Why did you let me sleep so late?”

Her voice came up the stairs. “You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to wake you!”

“When we’re in heaven, I’ll have all the time to sleep in the world!” Shaking myself awake, I plopped bare feet on carpet and pushed off the bed. “You should have got me up!”

I quickly showered and shaved—did not want to be grizzled for our Lord—and pulled together my traveling clothes. Something comfortable for the drive, easily changed when I got to Lake Michigan. I did not have time to figure out the hows and wherefores for boating there, but I could figure it out once I got there. Surely, a big city like Chicago would offer all the amenities a boating man would need.

Jesus held court on Galilee. I would hold court on Lake Michigan.

Over breakfast—

(At least the wife thought to make me a hearty breakfast: fried potatoes, eggs, bacon and sausage, waffles, and French toast. “We might as well eat it all now,” she said as she emptied the fridge. “After the Rapture, it’s all going to go bad.”)

—I looked over my to-do list. I had already lost precious man-hours, slept away like—well, those hours were gone. This was what I had planned:

1. Make list

2. Eat hearty breakfast

3. Make videotape for the neighbors

4. Have man-to-man with the boy

5. Listen to the girl play her clarinet

6. Make peace with Dad

7. Lunch with the boys at the office

8. Tell off boss

9. Go boating

I had planned to make a list of an even dozen—it’s a holy number, you know—but even at nine it ended up as a bit of a stretch. “Lunch with the boys at the office”? I wasn’t sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. I had no intention of even showing up at work that day.

Checking my watch, though, I saw that I would have to strike most of the items off. They were nice thoughts, but there just wasn’t enough time. According to my online map, it was about eight hours to Lake Michigan.

Mixing together the fried potatoes with the runny egg yolk, I looked over the list again and made some hard choices.

1. Make list. Well, okay, that was a given. I am not even sure why I bothered to make it an item. (I think it was to try and make it to the full twelve, but it did not work.) I scratched the item off the list.

2. Eat hearty breakfast. The wife may have goofed big-time letting me sleep through the alarm, but at least she took care of me here. Sure, it was her way of cleaning the fridge before the trumpet sounded, but it also meant I finally got to have sausage and bacon together. I deserve sausage and bacon. I scratched the item off the list.

3. Make videotape for the neighbors. This was my final chance to preach to the neighbors. Explain to them what had happened when a sizable percentage of the world’s population—best-case scenario, of course—suddenly disappears off the face of the earth. I had seen the classic end-times films, so I knew all the crazy theories that the world leaders would try to foist on an uneducated populace.