Sunday’s Coming!

                                                         

The above book cover is one that I remember seeing in my parent’s house.  Although I never read this particular book, the title captures the sentiments of one of the most feared events in Adventist eschatology.  The inevitable “Sunday Law” would soon be upon us, the ruling that would usher in the end times, a time of great testing for Seventh-day Adventists.  Here’s how the story goes:

Jesus will finish his second phase of atonement in the heavenly sanctuary (called the “Investigative Judgment”), and then make the solemn declaration found in Revelation 22:11.  Everyone who is already clean will stay clean, but anyone who is unjust will also have to stay that way.  In other words, you MUST be perfect by this point in earth’s history.  Christ’s character will have been perfectly reproduced by his church, so all who have entered into this perfect state will stay that way, but if you weren’t found to be perfect, there is no more hope for you.  Jesus will cease his work of mediation, and you will have to stand before God without a mediator.  This is known as the “close of probation.”  At the close of probation, the Sunday Law will be enacted in the United States, that “lamb-like beast.”  This law will state that everyone must worship on Sunday.  Those who do not worship on Sunday but instead keep the seventh-day Sabbath will not be able to buy or sell.  Even worse, the law will give “Sunday-keepers” the permission to hunt down and kill the Sabbath-keepers.  This is God’s final test of loyalty:  who will keep the true Sabbath?  Who will observe the day that marks God’s authority and who will worship on the day that gives authority to the Beast?  Who is part of God’s special, end-times remnant people?  Who is truly just?  Adventists believe that those who worship on the Sabbath will receive the Seal of God (because the Sabbath is the seal), and those who worship on Sunday will receive the Mark of the Beast (because Sunday is the mark).  But those with the Seal of God will be persecuted.  The most blood-thirsty for Sabbath-keepers’ deaths will be those of us who once “knew the truth” but rejected it.  This means that even family members will turn against each other.  Even a daughter will try to kill her own mother.  And that is why the impending Sunday Law is something that is very scary to an Adventist!

Wow, sorry to pack all of that into one paragraph!  This is probably very confusing to those of you who did not grow up being taught these things, and that’s ok, because it really doesn’t make sense, nor is it even remotely biblical.  It takes great leaps of logic to reach these conclusions.  Or maybe more like tremendous bounds over the boundaries of logic.

Growing up, I was exposed to many different venues that would “prepare” us for this time.  Adventist publishing houses have produced many books that tell morbidly adventurous tales of those living through the Sunday Law.  Adventist summer camps and schools put on skits and plays about the Sunday Law.  One summer camp recently put on a pre-enactment that included pointing guns at teenage campers’ heads.  Another fairly recent addition to Adventist’s Sunday Law education repertoire is Senior Survival, an event in which Adventist academies (boarding high schools) take their seniors on a camping trip that teaches them skills for living in the wilderness, since they might have to flee the Sunday-keepers someday.  I went to Senior Survival during my academy days.  While much of it is touted as being an opportunity for class bonding, the under-lying goal for the trip was to teach us how to survive when we would have to run to the hills for safety from the Sunday-keepers.

When I left Adventism and became a Christian, my first Easter was an eye-opening experience.  As I celebrated Holy Week for the first time, one of the things that stood out was what everyone was saying on Good Friday.  My fellow Christians would encourage each other by saying “It’s Friday now, but don’t worry, Sunday’s coming!”  These were words of hope and joyous expectation.  The darkness of the crucifixion would soon give way to the dawn of the resurrection, the crowning event of Christianity.  As an Adventist, “Sunday’s coming!” would be words that would strike terror in my heart.  They were heavy with the weight of judgment and solitary doom.  But as a Christian, these are words of comfort and celebration.  What a glorious difference!

Without the Resurrection, there is no Christianity.  We would all be fools worshiping a dead god.  But our God is alive!  He is victorious over death and the grave.  Because Jesus rose from the dead, we too are raised to life when we trust in Him to save us.  He calls our spirits from their tomb of sin and brings them into life, connection with the Life-Giver.  We are transferred from the domain of darkness into the Kingdom of the Beloved Son.  It’s a radical change, and it is all possible because Jesus rose and conquered death.  This is why we celebrate Resurrection Sunday, and this is also why Christians have chosen to come together and worship on the Lord’s Day.  We are not keeping the Jewish Sabbath, the shadow of our rest in Christ.  We are not transferring the Sabbath to Sunday.  We are celebrating a new thing.  We are celebrating our salvation in the Risen Lord and the New Covenant that now guides our lives.

That is why I can now proclaim with conviction and joy rather than with fear and doom, “Praise God, Sunday’s Coming!”

On Optimism and Too Many Emotions

I have often been referred to as an “eternal optimist.”  And, lately, people ask why I seem so happy, so “normal,” in light of my past.  I fooled everyone with my cheerful exterior, even myself.  To be honest, I sometimes will use my up-beat ways as evidence to myself that it wasn’t really that bad.  I wouldn’t be the bouncy, bubbly little girl that I was if I was being abused, right?  I must be over-exaggerating, I must want attention, I’m misinterpreting everything…and on it goes.

Why am I so happy?   Is it my natural personality?  Could it be a defense mechanism, a way of coping with a darker reality?  Did I separate myself from all the negative things that I must have been feeling?  I think that the answer is yes to all of those questions.  I think that a combination of those elements is part of what has helped me to survive.  I believe it was also a learned behavior, to an extent.  We are happy little Adventists, after all!  When I cried, my grandma always would chirp in her sing-songy way “Put on a happy face!”  I remember her telling me that tears were toxic to the system; crying was poisonous.  And all of those Ellen White quotes about how important it was for us to have cheerful countenances didn’t help, either.  Don’t ever say anything bad about the Adventist church to non-Adventists.  Some things are meant for Jesus’ ears only.  We are the remnant, we follow the health message, we rest every Sabbath!  Look healthy and happy!

When you mix all of that together, well, you get me.  When I am using positivity as a defense against the more painful emotions that I have separated away from myself, it becomes a coping mechanism that does not always serve me.  Surprise surprise, it’s ok to express sadness.  In fact, grieving is necessary for healing.  It’s part of being emotionally healthy.  Who knew?  I am now finding myself learning how to grieve.  Often, these emotions are so strong that they come out in strong waves of endless tears.  Sometimes it feels like the emotions are too big for me, like I’m a little child who is overwhelmed with feelings that she does not know how to handle.  I’m finding that I have to learn how to regulate feelings in the same way that a kid has to learn how to handle them during their growing up years.  I never learned how to do that, because it was not safe for me to grow like that.

Often I am encapsulated with fear that is so strong that it seems to be a living, breathing thing.  Often I feel like I am back in frightening situations, like they are happening RIGHT NOW, even though they happened years ago.   Fear is probably the most prominent emotion in my life, past and present.  Except, which is it?  Because the past feels like the present, so really, is the fear now or then?  Welcome to the confusing world of post-traumatic musings.   Fear is the emotion that I remember growing up, ranging from complete terror to a constant antsy nagging that things were about to explode, but never knowing when that moment could be.  It was constant.  It was there even in my cheerfulness.  It was always there.  You’ll probably see me writing about fear a lot in this blog.

But my optimism is also a gift.  It does serve me, at times, by helping me to not go completely catatonically crazy.  I can find the humor in what I’ve been through and I can see the sunshine on the path.  It’s what got me through and what continues to get me through.   It’s a problem when I use it to numb out and deny the other feelings, but it isn’t all bad.

There’s a new Netflix TV show that is all the rage right now.  “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is a hilariously light-hearted approach to post-traumatic stress.  Kimmy, the protagonist, spent 15 years of her life trapped in a cult that kept her in a bunker underground, because the apocalypse was above them!  I could make comparisons to Adventism here, but we’ll save that for another post (I’ll probably be talking more about this show on this blog; it’s too good not to share!).  The New Yorker ran an article about why the spring-time-sunshine-ponies-and-bunnies optimism of Kimmy Schmidt makes the show work, in spite of the awful circumstances of the story.  I simply must quote the last sentence of the article.  “That’s the key to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s ambition: by making horrible things funny, it suggests that surviving could be more than just living on. It could be a kind of freedom, too.”

And THAT is what makes the survival worth it.  The indescribable joy of freedom.  Think of a person who has spent a lifetime locked in a building with no windows.  Think of how that person would feel when they step outside the building for the first time.  Yes, there would be fear, confusion, overwhelm, all of that, but also a pure form of exhilaration.  That is what it is like to discover the truth about Jesus and the Gospel and grace.  That is how it feels to eat bacon for the first time or pierce your ears.  That is how it feels to worship together on Sunday morning with Christians and not think that they are either “poor, deceived Sunday-keepers” or maybe your future persecutor, murderer!  That is how it feels to be free from the emotional bonds of an abusive family.  The freedom to LIVE for Christ is amazing.  It makes all the pain, tears, fear, loss, terror, flashbacks, nightmares, everything, it makes all of that worth it.  JESUS IS WORTH IT.

Well, true to Laini style, I have once again ended a blog post about awful things on a happy note.  Just wait until I post my poems, people.  Ain’t no sunshine in those babies!  But that’s for another time.  For now…thank you, Jesus, for the joy of finding freedom in You.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/candy-girl