No Tomorrow

On April 27, 2011, David Wilkerson died. The car he was driving inexplicably wandered into the path of an oncoming truck. Wilkerson died at the scene of the crash.

I wonder how to react to such news. I must admit that when I heard it, I drew a deep breath. It felt as if a heavy weight sitting on my chest had lifted. "He is dead, and I am alive," I mumbled. "How ironic is that?"

An picture of my former home in Montana rose before my eyes, clearer than the dining room in front of me. I seemed to see the whole sweeping vista of grassland, horse pastures, distant mountains, and a beautiful home surrounded by lilac bushes and petunia beds. It all started here, here where my mother read David Wilkerson's book Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth and became obsessed with apocalyptic visions.

Thinking of Montana always makes me a little sad, because it reminds me of all that we lost, or rather all that we gave away. This picturesque landscape could have been the making of a very happy childhood with many long-term friendships. But we were only children, and we quickly became infected with my mother's particular brand of insanity. Soon, we were convinced that the United States was about to be destroyed by fire from heaven, and that our only path of escape lay in selling our home and venturing overseas to the 'mission field.' And so we left, even cheering our good fortune at finding someone to buy the house.

As I see it in my mind now--the beautiful old home, the rolling fields, the river--I always wonder why we did not see what we were giving up. The 'mission work' never really worked out the way my mother thought it would. No mass conversions took place, no great healing ministry, no glorious rapture or even martyrdom. After five years wandering around South Korea, we returned to the United States with little to show for our experience. I left home, my parents went back overseas, and after that, I rarely saw my family again.

Apocalyptic predictions (such as the one given by Harold Camping) are tremendously damaging. People who think that there is no future do strange things. And our family certainly became very strange. I remember lying on the turquoise living room carpet in that house in Montana and crying silently as I listened to my mother read David Wilkerson's book aloud to us and told us that the end was near. I thought of everything I wanted to do with my life--how I wanted to grow up and go to college and get married and have children ... and now it was all disappearing. There was no tomorrow. We had to act before it was too late. We had to sell the house and move to the mission field.

Except that there was a tomorrow. And here it is now. But what a lot of needless pain and anguish went into the discovery that, like every false prophet, David Wilkerson was wrong. I wonder whether he ever knew how many people suffered because of him, or whether he surrounded himself only with people who told him what a great man of God he was. I wonder whether he believed his own predictions or he was only attention-seeking. I wonder whether he went to heaven or to hell.

I cannot know his mind. All that I know is that one morning when he got into his car for a drive, there was no tomorrow for him. I will leave the rest to God.