Facing the Future (9 page)

J
UDD
appreciated Bruce’s custom of having strangers tell their stories immediately after being introduced. Everyone now attending New Hope had, of course, been left behind at the Rapture, and so each had a story to tell. Where were they when it happened? How had they missed out? Whom had they lost? How did they find the truth? And what were they doing now?

The lawyer, Beth Murray, was an extremely tall, dark-haired woman with sharp features but a soft smile. When she and Bruce and Judd were seated, Bruce asked Judd to tell his story first. As many times as he had told it, it never grew old for him. There were sad parts, of course. Regrets. Fear. Even terror. There were parts he didn’t much enjoy rehashing—discovering his family was gone, realizing he was alone in the world.

And yet Judd loved to get to the grace part. He never grew tired of telling the wonderful news that he had been given a second chance. God’s grace extended to him despite his rebellion and failure the first time around. He realized he had been more than fortunate. He could easily have been killed in an accident during the Rapture, as so many others had. His voice grew quavery when he told how he had learned from Bruce that the Christian life was a series of new beginnings.

Judd became quickly aware that Beth Murray had learned well the listening part of her craft. She leaned forward, rested her chin on her fist, and locked in to his gaze. She made him feel as if he were the most important person in her world just then. It seemed she didn’t want to miss a word. It nearly made Judd uncomfortable, but soon he realized it was her way of encouraging him, and he plunged ahead.

Ms. Murray grew emotional along with Judd as he recounted how he had met the other three kids and had invited them to live with him. She particularly enjoyed the brief stories of how each had come to Christ. “I can’t wait to meet each of them and hear them tell of their own journeys.”

Her story was a new one to Judd. She said she had been an atheist, “but in actuality, describing myself as an agnostic would have been more precise. I worshiped at the altar of education, achievement, and materialism. I married a nonpracticing Jewish man ten years ago, and we got along fine until about eighteen months ago. I believed I was the most open-minded and tolerant person in the world until Isaiah converted to Christianity and began attending a messianic synagogue. I was mortified. I was angry. I refused to discuss it. I would not attend with him. Our marriage was nearly on the rocks, and yet I could not deny the change in him. No matter how I treated him, he loved me and forgave me and treated me kindly.

“I was not happy in a marriage with a man I respected but whose belief system I could not respect. Much as I love children, I’m so grateful Isaiah and I decided not to have any. I was on the brink of an affair when the Rapture occurred. Isaiah had warned me of that, and so I was speeding toward that messianic synagogue within ten minutes of the disappearances. No one was there. Every person associated with that fellowship was gone. I stumbled across New Hope. I simply drove past and saw it here, a church with a few people milling about. I met Pastor Barnes, I watched the videotape that had been prepared for people just like me, and I joined the kingdom.”

With their stories—which Bruce sometimes referred to as “testimonies”—out of the way, they got down to the reason for their meeting. Beth Murray told Judd that Bruce had brought her up-to-date on Talia Grey’s case. “I have studied her file, and it doesn’t look good for her at this point. She was much more deeply involved than you might have assumed in many of the crimes committed by her brother and his friend. The best thing we have going for us is that court dockets are jammed and only getting worse. I have a few ideas, but Bruce tells me you have one too.”

“If you don’t mind,” Judd said.

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

Judd told her of the idea that had come to him in the middle of the night. “I don’t claim to know much about the law, and I guess I thought of this because of the things I’ve seen on TV. But I was just wondering whether she might be able to help herself by agreeing to testify against LeRoy and Cornelius.”

“That’s an excellent idea, Judd,” she said. “I had been thinking of something along those lines as well. If she is willing and brave enough to withstand the threats of LeRoy’s and her brother’s associates, she just may be able to do herself lot of good. Good thinking.”

“Actually,” Judd said, “now that I have met you and think about it a little, I see one more big advantage to having you working with Talia.”

“And what’s that?” Ms. Murray said.

“You’ll have to interview Sergeant Tom Fogarty, won’t you?”

“Yes. In fact, I already have.”

“And did you meet his wife?”

“Just briefly. It was long enough, however, for me to sense that there’s some tension there.”

Judd and Bruce filled her in, and the three of them agreed to be praying for just the right opening for Beth to support Mrs. Fogarty in her new faith and to perhaps reach Tom for Christ.

Judd drove home that day feeling better than he had in a long time. He was glad he had met Beth Murray, and he was optimistic about the futures of his new acquaintances. He knew there were no guarantees. He knew that in real life, not everyone made decisions or took the actions one might want them to.

He enjoyed being able to tell Vicki that he had not only kept her confidence but that she would also get her wish to meet Cameron Williams and hear of his experiences with Nicolae Carpathia. That meeting came one momentous afternoon the following week, when Mr. Williams was able to get away from the Chicago bureau office of
Global Weekly
magazine and join the Kids Tribulation Force and Bruce for a highly secret meeting.

To Vicki, the ruggedly handsome thirtyish Buck Williams seemed like a man more comfortable with adults than with teenagers. He greeted them warmly enough, but he was a bit formal and quiet, something she knew he couldn’t be normally with a job like his. He joined them in their prayer time, but then he sat behind the kids.

Bruce began the meeting by finishing his promised lesson on the time chart of the seven-year tribulation. “It looks to me,” he said, “and to many of the experts who came before us, like this period of history we’re in right now will last for the first twenty-one months of the Tribulation. They encompass what the Bible calls the seven Seal Judgments, or the judgments of the seven-sealed scroll. Then comes another twenty-one-month period in which we will see the seven Trumpet Judgments. In the last forty-two months of the seven years, if we have survived, we will endure the most severe test, the seven Vial Judgments. The last half of the seven years is called the Great Tribulation, and if we are alive at the end of it, we will be rewarded by seeing the glorious appearing of Christ.

“These judgments get progressively worse, and they will be harder and harder to survive. If we die, we will be in heaven with Christ and our loved ones. But we may suffer horrible deaths. If we somehow make it through the seven terrible years, especially the last half, the Glorious Appearing will be all that more glorious. Christ will come back to set up his thousand-year reign on Earth, the Millennium.

“Let me just briefly outline the seven-sealed scroll from Revelation 5 and 6, and then we’ll hear from Mr. Williams. On the one hand, I don’t want to give you a spirit of fear, but we all know we’re still here because we neglected salvation before the Rapture. I know we’re all grateful for the second chance, but we cannot expect to escape the trials that are coming.”

Bruce explained that the first four seals in this scroll were described as men on four horses: a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale horse. “The white horseman apparently is the Antichrist, who ushers in one to three months of diplomacy while getting organized and promising peace.

“The red horse signifies war. Three rulers from the south will oppose the Antichrist, and millions will be killed.”

Bruce turned a sheet on his flip chart. “All that killing will likely come within the next eighteen months. Immediately following that, which will take only three to six months because of the nuclear weaponry available, the Bible predicts inflation and famine—the black horse. As the rich get richer, the poor starve to death. More millions will die that way. Sad to say, it gets worse. That killer famine could be as short as two or three months before the arrival of the fourth Seal Judgment, the fourth horseman on a pale horse—the symbol of death. Besides the postwar famine, a plague will sweep the entire world. Before the fifth Seal Judgment a quarter of the world’s current population will be dead. You’re going to recognize this judgment, because we’ve talked about it before. Remember my telling you about 144,000 Jewish witnesses who evangelize the world for Christ? The world leader and the harlot, which is the name for the one-world religion that denies Christ, will murder many of the converts, perhaps millions.

“The sixth Seal Judgment consists of God pouring out his wrath against the killing of his saints. This will come in the form of a worldwide earthquake so devastating that no instruments will be able to measure it. It will be so bad that people will cry out for rocks to fall on them and put them out of their misery. The seventh seal introduces the seven Trumpet Judgments, which will take place in the second quarter of the seven years. That’s the second twenty-one months.”

Bruce concluded, “Most believers will be murdered or die from war, famine, plagues, or earthquakes.”

Vicki was depressed. She found herself actually looking forward to Mr. Williams’s presentation. She knew times would be rough, and she didn’t expect any better. But this was devastating. Whatever Cameron Williams had to say had to be better than this.

“First,” Mr. Williams said, “I go by
Buck.
Calling me
Mr. Williams
makes me feel too old, and calling me
Cameron
makes me think you’re making fun of me the way kids did in grade school years ago.”

Vicki couldn’t help but smile. There wasn’t much to smile about these days, but Buck Williams’s rapid-fire delivery was fun to listen to. Her mind had been changed about him immediately. He proved to be an intense, impassioned guy. And he was a natural-born teacher.

“Remember your vow of confidentiality,” Buck said, “and here we go. My assignment, as I understand it, is to use my own experience and conversations with Nicolae Carpathia to convince you he is who Bruce fears he is. Let me run this down quickly. As you may have seen on the news, he’s asked for resolutions from the U.N. supporting some of the things he wants to do. These include a seven-year peace treaty with Israel in exchange for his ability to broker the desert-fertilizer formula. He’s moving the U.N. to New Babylon. He’s establishing a one-world religion, probably headquartered in Italy. Though he might have trouble with the Jews on that one, he has promised to help them rebuild their temple during the years of the peace treaty. He believes they deserve special treatment. All those things are predicted in the Bible.”

Buck Williams had been standing. Now he pulled up a chair and sat with the kids. “Let me tell you a story that I wouldn’t believe myself if I had not lived it. I have gained the attention and respect of Nicolae Carpathia. My former boss has become his public relations man. Because of that, I got invited to a private meeting at the U.N. immediately before Carpathia was to introduce to the world his ten new international ambassadors.