10,000 hits and counting…

Well, the Rapture Song video has reached 10,000 views at YouTube. Clearly, 990,000 short of one million (Topher, Kevin and I are looking for that dinner you owe us), but it’s received much more attention than I thought it would get. The responses have been funny and sad. And there truthfully have been some that we just couldn’t post. Either because they were just plain inappropriate or didn’t help further intelligent discussion on the matter.

There were a couple of interesting developments this weekend that I thought you might enjoy:

• I understand from Paul Clark, that Larry Norman saw the video. After viewing it, he chuckled and said, “That’s cute.”
• This past Sunday at ‘mega-church’ Rocky Mountain Christian Church in Niwot, Colorado. Special guest speaker Mark Scott, Academic Dean at Ozark Christian College, led off his sermon, “The End Is Near”, with The Rapture Song video. After it finished, he began by saying, “In the words of Larry the Cable Guy, ‘That’s funny, I don’t care who you are.’”
• Meryl is working on Randy Bonifield and the Left Behind Tour t-shirts. I’m looking forward to seeing the design and the itinerary.

It’s really sad that I will be known from here on as the YouTube Rapture Song guy….

Good Conversation

Like it or hate it, you have to admit “The Rapture Song” is causing quite a bit of conversation. Do a google search and be amazed…

In the meantime, I’ll clarify just in case those who care stop by and read this blog: Yes, it was a sermon intro. After more research (with my mother) I was ten, not eight. It’s a provocative piece - meant to make you laugh or cry, be angry or hysterical, or maybe all of the aforementioned feelings - and any way you look at it, you’re thinking about, talking about, maybe even blogging about or posting a comment about…eschatology. And likewise, this was my therapeutic exercise in connecting a sermon to life, specifically my life, and made me start considering the whole topic again.

Also to clarify, I think it’s funny. I hope you do, too. If you don’t, lighten up a little bit and recognize it’s okay to laugh at ourselves from time to time. C’mon…Testamints? I mean, they might very well be effective (I have no idea), but they still make me giggle.

What are some other things like this that make you laugh?

“Rapture” Stories

I shared this story with Mike King yesterday. Thought I should share it here:

I came home from junior high school (that’s what we used to call it back then) to a home that usually held a greeting from my mom as I would enter. This particular day, however, there was no greeting. Thinking nothing of it, I took my school stuff and put it in my room and came out hoping mom was just in the kitchen getting me some sort of great after school snack. I entered the kitchen only to find mom wasn’t there.

I began to call out for her - searching each of the upstairs rooms, calling her name as I entered each but around every corner…no mom. Little by little my voice rose in volume and pitch as I began to wonder if the rapture had come and I’d been left behind.

“Mom!”

She wasn’t outside.

“MOM!”

She wasn’t in the garage.

MOOOOOMMMMM!!!!

I couldn’t find her. I’d been left behind. Then, in a shriek that can only be emitted by a pre-pubescent middle school boy, I screamed.

MOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!! MOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!

“WHAT!” came a voice from downstairs. It was my mother. She had been doing the laundry in the back room of the basement. “What is WRONG with you?”

“Nothing.” I said.

We had cheese puffs.

Left Behind (The Rapture Song)

Here is a video from a performance of a song that I wrote recently about the shaping of my views of the end times through the films and songs of the ’70’s. We used this at my church this past Sunday.

This really resonated with a lot of folks so Kevin Harlan and I posted it on YouTube. Enjoy it, share it, blog about it, email it to a friend. I am really amazed at the number of people blogging about it already. Hopefully, you find this for what it’s meant to be: humorous self discovery with a bit of sadness mixed in. I wrote it to precede the sermon our senior pastor, Tom Nelson, delivered on prophecy and the book of Daniel.