I’ve read more than my fair share about The Rapture. Somehow stories about “the end” have often found a way to my shelf and I discovered Left Behind when the series had just put out book 4 in paperback – they already had over 4 million readers and I found it in a Waldenbooks, on an end cap with all four books stacked up there. The marketing team on the covers did a nice job, so I picked up the first book. Several years and 15 books later, and I’m pretty well read on the theory of it all. Did it impact my world view? My religious beliefs? My day to day coding expertise? Nah. I read the books as fiction, no matter how preachy they got. After the third or fourth book, I actually got really good at skipping the chunks of preaching, and kept the story and dialog moving quite well.

In fact, three things stood out to me from the book series: the authors of the series tell a great story, they have great copy editors (because I found very, very few errors in their text, unlike a lot of books today,) and they really believe in what they’re writing about. And if you do opt to read these books, end up changing religions, and are happy about that, then I’m happy for you, but it didn’t happen that way for me. I often recommend fictional books and this set is one of them for me. If I acted on all of the fiction I read… well, between Tolkien and Lewis, I would be trying on every single ring I saw, hoping for something glorious to happen. Ah well.

Anyway, imagine my surprised when I heard that someone had predicted the actual date of The Rapture – I said “Eh?” and went straight to Wikipedia.
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