Growing Up Religious

From a very young age I was raised with the belief that God was going to come down from heaven at any point in time and take the qualified up to heaven and spend eternity together. This was how they defined the second coming of Jesus, or the rapture. For the kids in my family, hearing this was a curious thing to wrap our minds around since there was no real agreement on what Heaven would actually be like, how God would be coming back or what that event would be like. Vague explanations left room for our imaginations to conjure up some pretty imaginative methods for the second coming. Let’s just summarize it with, the rapture was presented as the promise of all things grand and glorious and the absolute absence of pain and suffering. Anyone that didn’t make the cut for spending eternity in heaven was sentenced to a lifetime of pain and suffering in a much less hospitable location.

The lack of specifics on the “how” it would all go down cracked opened the opportunity for fear to settle in. We just didn’t know what to expect or when to expect it. As kids, every time someone didn’t respond to a yell across the house, we all thought two things. “Is this the moment...did I miss it?”.

I am confident my loving parents did not intend to create a sense of panic when someone could not (or did not) respond. It was just the nature of the concept to introduce such a grand party and never include the details on exactly how to get there or how to get in. That’s a different topic altogether that even to this day is still being debated and explored. Exactly how does one obtain a Golden Ticket? Is it through good deeds, predetermined destiny based on grace from our sinful nature, or even following all the commandments? Either way, this is why I am convinced that the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) started in religious households that believe in the concepts of the rapture.

We grew up with very little. My dad, a brilliant man, chose to be a teacher and my mom initially chose to stay home and raise the seven of us. Seven kids, living in a shady suburb of New York, on a teacher’s salary. That’s the kind of poor that qualified us for government assistance. When going without, we turned to within. My mom was incredibly creative, imaginative, and loved to play with us when we were little. We all had very active imaginations and would play for hours in the backyard or in the street playing wiffleball. We created entire environments out of things around the house to engage our imaginations while playing with the few toys we did have. We used ev-er-y-thing as something. Our “playhouse” was a line of Forsythia bushes that had overgrown. We shoved an old gutter downspout up through the bush to act as our stovepipe and sat on a discarded bench seat from an old van.

Creativity and imagination were cornerstones to our childhood. Keep in mind, we’re going back to a time without cell phones, location updates, or text messaging to see where people were. You just existed. You were mentally present with your family and communicated travel plans verbally, through handwritten notes or a corded push-button phone. This was not the era of “where are you?” texts or GPS phone tracking.

Taking these two things, imagination and lack of immediate communication, created a ripe environment for living in fear of missing out on the rapture.

I remember coming up from the basement one day and the whole house was empty. My first thoughts were “O no…. o no. It’s happened. My family is gone and I didn’t go to heaven because I keep stealing snacks from the freezer”. After collecting myself and working towards rational thought, I start calling out for my Mom in my shaky pre-teen voice. I desperately hoped it was just one of the times she was hiding somewhere to jump out and scare me. Sadly, no response. We didn’t have a big house, but time stood still as I slinked room by room, looking for any sign of life. As the panic grew, so did my efforts to find a living soul. I eventually made it to the backyard and found my mom hanging up laundry outside. Tremendous relief once I realized that I didn’t miss out due to being a sinner that steals frozen treats.

Years later, I still find myself remembering the panic and fear that I associate with religion and, more specifically, what happens after. Having spiritual FOMO is a whole different level. Now that I've lived half my life, I'm in a healthier state of mind and am able to walk through these moments and recognize them for what they were.