Photo Credit: Randal Sexton

Sam Sexton (left) mourns the loss of his Raptured friend at the Maker Faire while a really cool motorcycle (right) looks on.

I’m not exactly somebody you could call religious.  I’ve made it a habit to avoid churches and other religious institutions since that one time I entered one and burst into flames (the burns finished healing in April, NOT THAT ANYBODY ASKED), and while I used to be a devout Pastafarian, I’ve lapsed a bit.  With all the suffering and pain in the world, it seems absurd that an omnipotent, benevolent Flying Spaghetti Monster would claim to love us while doing absolutely nothing to ease our pain.  So until Saturday, May 21^st, I really wasn’t all that confident in the existence of a higher power.

Of course, this was before the Rapture hit.

The day didn’t seem very different at first.  Everything seemed to be going as planned: my dad, my brother, his girlfriend, our fundamentalist-Christian friend Tim, and I were all set to check out the Maker’s Faire.  For those who don’t know, the Maker’s Faire is an annual weekend gathering where enterprising nerds show off all the gadgetry and doo-dads they’ve been making.  We were all set to enjoy it when we encountered a minor hiccup: Tim got Raptured.

It happened so fast.  One second, he was whining that we were taking “too darn long,” and the next second, poof! No more Tim.  Just his button-up shirt, his raggedy jeans, and one of his sandals (Tim really liked his right sandal, so I guess he took it with him). The grief at having lost our friend led to the slow realization that this could be definite proof of the existence of God as interpreted by radical Christians.  Then we got bored and decided to take Tim to the Maker’s Faire anyway.

Considering the horrifying implications of Tim’s disappearance on human existence, everyone at the Maker’s Faire seemed happy and calm.  People were walking around in everything from casual clothes to steampunk ensembles, as well as one person, whom I now consider my role model, who wore a giant, functioning Gameboy.  Knowing that we were all doomed to suffer in torment until we were recruited into the inevitable war between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist that would result in a river of blood 200 miles long and as deep as a horse, we grimly decided to try our best to enjoy the various attractions of the Maker’s Faire.  But we knew in the back of our minds that all this was meaningless, that only we seemed to know the truth, and that was an ever-present damper on the fun, making enjoying the functioning R2-D2s and bottlecap robots and gigantic talking metal giraffes extremely difficult.  It can’t be described as anything less than a somber, somber day.

Still, there was one bright spot.  Despite inhabiting a different plane of existence, what remained of Tim seemed to enjoy the Faire.  We showed him all the things he had wanted to see and even set him up by some key areas for the memories and to warn the heathen thralls who obliviously believed today was an ordinary day.

But the most shocking, terrifying thing about this whole ordeal was the realization that the rapture never actually happened.  We hadn’t been hauling Tim around all day; it was just some stupid set of clothes, so shoddy it seemed almost deliberately selected with the knowledge that it would be repetitively placed on the ground for photo ops.  This realization, followed by the realization that this meant Tim never existed at all, that he must have been some sort of group hallucination, came completely out of left field.  We headed home humbled by the ability of the human brain to deceive the rest of our senses to see what isn’t actually there.

Of course, this was all before we went home and found that Tim woke up that morning, realized we’d left him behind to go to the Faire, robbed our house and set it on fire.  So there are two lessons from this story: Go to the Maker’s Faire at every chance you get, and don’t trust people named Tim.  They’re jerks.