Get Ready for Modern-Day Martyrdom/ Fr Jonathan Morris/Abdul Rahman

This is something that I have been discussing for years with relatives and friends who love the Rapture. I can understand the reasoning used for the belief, but I have never believed it for several reasons. Primarily because it is essentially an "American thinking process" that does not like suffering of any kind.

(Now I know that no one does, but we here in the USA have a real abhorence of it... we don't like to repair anything, including relationships, and think that we are supposed to be 'happy and fulfilled' all the time, with plenty of money, nice cars, huge homes.... abundantly).

We ditch an 'unhappy marriage' and move on to another (forgetting that we take ourselves with us...). We may help the poor, but often also find a way to 'be above them'.

And the disabled? Well, abort 'em, if we know ahead of time that they will be born 'that way' (Down's Syndrom is just one example. I know of male children of hemophilia carriers also having been aborted...). If the poor child was born first, we now have MANY proponents of 'letting them go', some even advocating infanticide up to the first year of life. God forbid that one has an accident of any sort where brain injury causes severe disability, because then.... you become expendable and can be starved/dehydrated to death.

Why? Because the great "I" would not want to live like 'that', and therefore, 'they' would not either.... because "we" are relieving 'their' suffering, which is more 'our' suffering in seeing them 'that way'....

So my comment to my friends is simple.

IF the Rapture happens, and He takes all born again believers off the face of the earth before tribulation begins... I will be among those Christians.

But IF the Rapture is not true, and it does NOT happen, what are YOU doing to prepare for what Jesus promised His followers? Persecution... martyrdom.

According to those who keep track of statistics for those martyred for their Faith, the 20th Century had more martyrs than all of the other 19 before combined. Who are we to think that those of us in the USA (Canada, too... ) will never have to suffer and possibly die for our Faith?

I don't include England, Ireland, or Europe in that statement because in history (recent and not so recent) there HAVE been those who died for the Faith in many of these countries. Evidence in Europe just sixty years ago with the deaths of 11 million people, including 6 million Jews) and the imprisonment and persecution of many others simply for being Jewish, or for being Christian and speaking out against this... atrocity.

So, to me, the teaching of the Rapture is just more of our denial...or worse, of our thinking that we are somehow going to be spared what people right now in many nations are going through simply because we ... happened to have been born (or moved) here.

Arrogant? Denial? Perhaps both?

I have been saying for many years that we need to be ready to stand firm in our Faith in good times and in bad.... and even possible martyrdom.

And now, we see a scenario in Afghanistan that upsets our way of thinking, played out in front of us, a scene that MANY have faced this past century...

Please see, and read the email Fr Jonathan Morris received from an Afghan Christian:

Get Ready for Modern-Day Martyrdom

by Father Jonathan Morris