Deconstructing the Rapture Series
“Not because I was trying to abandon faith,
but because I had finally been given permission to ask what I had always felt.”
Deconstructing the Pentecostal Apostolic Christianity I was raised in revealed something unexpected:
I was always a deep thinker.
A critical thinker.
An empathetic soul.
Someone who tried to understand others—sometimes to a fault.
But I was also tender-hearted.
And that made me vulnerable.
The teachings of the church didn’t just shape me.
They buried me.
They taught me to be silent.
To suppress my curiosity.
To accept fear as holiness.
And they did so with urgency, repetition, and the threat of being left behind.
I had questions I didn’t dare ask.
Questions that looped through my brain in anxious circles.
Questions that followed me into sleep and showed up in my dreams:
Am I doing enough to escape the Tribulation?
Will I be chosen to be raptured?
What if I miss the trumpet sound?
What if I’m left behind because I didn’t pray hard enough—or repent the right way?
There was no one I could ask.
No space where I felt safe enough to speak the fear out loud.
Only altar calls, warnings, and quiet terror masked as reverence.
It seemed like I lived every day with a quiet dread simmering just beneath the surface.
The fear of missing the Rapture wasn’t just a passing thought—it was a presence.
It shaped my decisions, my inner dialogue, and the way I moved through the world.
I began to expect the worst.
A car accident. A fire. A violent attack. Illness. Something sudden and catastrophic.
And when those worst-case scenarios played in my mind, they came with a twisted kind of comfort:
Maybe, I thought, if I die doing something good—helping someone, going to church, being kind—then at least I’ll make it to heaven. At least I won’t be left behind.
That’s how deep the fear went.
So deep, it made death feel like a safer option than living in uncertainty.
Underneath all that chaos, confusion, and questioning, one thought kept surfacing:
How do I know if the Rapture is even real?
Not just a belief. Not just a sermon.
But real.
And then—a word I didn’t yet have language for—rose up from deep within:
Deconstruction.
It popped like a quiet firecracker in the center of my being, scattering embers of questions I had buried in ash.
It didn’t arrive with violence.
It arrived with breath.
With light.
With permission.
Suddenly, those long-held, silent questions began to whisper for air.
They weren’t rebellious.
They were honest.
The church I grew up in didn’t use any other sources of learning.
Just the Bible.
The one and only book.
The only lens.
The only truth allowed.
So my curiosity had no place to grow.
My critical-thinking brain was starved.
My wonder became dangerous.
It wasn’t until university that I encountered something revolutionary:
Books.
Other people.
Other religions.
Other ways of seeing and knowing and being.
That’s when the floodgates opened.
Not because I was trying to abandon faith,
but because I had finally been given permission to ask what I had always felt.
In Part Three, I’ll explore what I learned about church history—how the early church fathers never taught the Rapture, and how the Black church I was raised in unknowingly embodied a theology rooted not in our history, but in someone else’s invention.