I remember sitting in church as a 9 year-old kid. Bored—as 9 year-olds in church often are. I’d done the word search in the kids’ bulletin, filled up an offering envelope playing Tic Tac Toe with my brother. Not a whole lot else to do.

“You could listen,” my mother would say. But that seemed like an impossibility to me at the time … and even sometimes still.

So, I took out a pew Bible and started rooting around in it. I’m not quite sure how I got onto Revelation, but I did. And in fairly short order I was reading about beasts and dragons and the end of the world.

At first, I thought, “Wow! This beats the heck out of listening to some guy drone on from the pulpit.” (It was always a guy.) It was like sci-fi/fantasy stuff. Tongues made out of swords, cataclysms, a rider on a white horse. Right in my wheelhouse. It was the stuff of comic books and video games. (Of course, there weren’t video games at that point in history, kids. Back in the Middle Ages all we had to play with were rocks, pointy sticks, and Pong.)

But pretty soon that which had at first intrigued me started scaring me when I realized that somehow I might be caught up in all of these crazy end of the world shenanigans.

And I thought, “How do they let kids read this stuff? What are my parents thinking? They won’t even let me watch Three’s Company, but they’ll turn me loose to roam around in the book of Revelation completely unsupervised?”

Then, of course, I remembered a Larry Norman song that was popular in the church circles I ran around in as a kid. Brutal, this thing was. Scared the bejeebers out of me:

life was filled with guns and war

and everyone got trampled on the floor

i wish we’d all been ready

children died the days grew cold

a piece of bread could buy a bag of gold

i wish we’d all been ready

there’s no time to change your mind

the son has come and you’ve been left behind

a man and wife asleep in bed

she hears a noise and turns her head he’s gone

i wish we’d all been ready

two men walking up a hill

one disappears and one’s left standing still