The Crazy Catholic

During my conversion, the most difficult Catholic teaching for me to accept wasn’t the papacy, Marian dogmas, or natural family planning (although that was a big one!). It was the fact that the rapture isn’t real.

You should have seen my face when, at the very end of my OCIA process, the deacon casually told me that the rapture was a relatively recent invention. The concept was popularized in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby through a system called dispensationalism. I felt like I’d been lied to my whole life.

The Left Behind series came out when I was in elementary school, and I devoured the kids’ version like Jesus was coming back at any second. I fully expected believers to be supernaturally evacuated before things got truly bad. There was something deeply reassuring about that idea.

Jesus would swoop in and save me from the worst of the end times. Like one of the superheroes my kids love to watch. After all, Christians shouldn’t have to suffer, right? If I spend my whole life believing, trying to be faithful, and I still have to endure tribulation in the end… then what was the point?

That’s where I got it wrong. Nowhere does Scripture promise that Christians will have it easy. In fact, it promises the opposite. “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And again: “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). If anything, Christians are held to a higher standard. “To whom much is given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48). The Christian life was never meant to be an escape plan.

The Catholic Church teaches that Christ will return in glory. But she does not teach that believers will be secretly removed from suffering before a final trial. In fact, the Catechism speaks of a final testing of the Church that will shake the faith of many (CCC 675).

I hate to be the bearer of bad news the way my deacon was for me, but if your faith life is easy all the time, you’re doing it wrong. Comfort is not the primary metric of sanctity. God calls us to suffer, not for the sake of suffering itself, and not to romanticize martyrdom, but because suffering unites us to Christ.

While Catholicism deepened my faith, it also stripped away some illusions, such as ruining music and movies for me. There are days my depression feels heavier, not lighter. There are moments I still want to cry out, “Jesus, come get me!” But it is precisely through suffering that we begin to understand Calvary.

No amount of suffering we endure will ever compare to what Christ experienced on the Cross. And yet, mysteriously, He allows us to share in His redemptive suffering. Not because He needs it. Because we do.

The rapture promised rescue. The Cross promises transformation.

So yes, part of me still wishes for Superman to fly in and carry us out before things get hard. But God is not a comic-book hero. He does not pull us out of every fire. He steps into it with us. And this time, He’s not coming to save us from suffering. He’s coming to redeem it.