The Rapture Was Coming and I Refused to Be Left Behind

Princella Talley
6 min readAug 22, 2024
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

At 10 years old, I was certain I would die alone and go to hell.

I’d attended Vacation Bible School and watched a movie series about the rapture and what it meant to be “left behind.” The premise was simple enough. Live according to the instructions and rules of the Holy Bible or be left on Earth with other degenerates as God-fearing and religiously obedient people were taken up into the sky to be with white Jesus.

Historians can confirm that no one knows exactly what Jesus looks like. But the vision of Jesus that I prayed to in my young mind was Salvator Mundi­ (Latin for ‘Savior of the World’), a painting with a complicated history mostly credited to Leonardo da Vinci. Salvator Mundi was the only version of Jesus I’d seen at the time, and I knew better than to question it.

Being left behind after the rapture meant experiencing an Earth that would get hotter than boiling crawfish during a Louisiana summer. Food would be rationed, each day would test your ability to survive. Many would die from the elements. Others would be killed for becoming Christians — a hack that would allow you to get into heaven post-rapture. You could up your odds of survival only by getting the “mark of the beast,” symbolizing that you follow the Antichrist.

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