This is a little story about how people are different, and how things you start don't turn out at all like you intended.
When my mom was a teenager, the Methodist church she attended at that time got a fire-and-brimstone-and-eternal-damnation minister. Reverend K. convinced my mother that she was going to hell. And from what she told me, she went through many years convinced of that, crying at night over what would become of her, and then what would become of me.
When she met my stepfather when I was ten, he had a stable job, a house, and a religion: an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of the Jehovah's Witnesses. They didn't proselytize, no unusual clothing required; they spent about two hours a week studying the Bible, and they guaranteed you wouldn't go to hell if you belonged. My mother was baptized within a year.
And they were apocalypticists. Constant predictions, rationalizations, new predictions.
I spent the next ten years or so being relentlessly recruited, grieved over, dragged to meetings and chastised. If I wanted to go to a Methodist church, I could find one and go there. I politely, then stubbornly, then angrily refused, and refused, and refused. I don't claim to know God, but I knew they were wrong. My stepfather hated black people, Catholics, and me (and because his hate of black people was stronger than that of Catholics, I ended up in a convent school for high school, where he got the chance to refer to my friends' religion as The Whore of Babylon in front of them). At a point while I was in college, the church threw out my mother, because somehow they'd missed that she was divorced after I was born. That led to one of many, many schisms.
Well, I grew up, thank God. I escaped. I'm escapee.
I know my mother never really gave much thought to what her religious conversion might mean to me, other than a vague picture of a TV-ish family, everybody happy. The conflict upset her badly. I'm sorry for that, but I'm sorrier that enough of the apocalypticism stuck that even as I know that Harold Camping's organization has renewed their FCC licenses for the next several years, a little tiny fear lingers inside me. I could kick myself, but there it is.
I'll be really, really glad to see you all tomorrow.