Abandoning Faith, Grace, and Joseph

It's been bugging me since I read it yesterday:

The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday.

The three teenagers have been struggling to make sense of their shifting world, which started changing nearly two years ago when their mother, Abby Haddad Carson, left her job as a nurse to "sound the trumpet" on mission trips with her husband, Robert, handing out tracts. They stopped working on their house and saving for college.

Last weekend, the family traveled to New York, the parents dragging their reluctant children through a Manhattan street fair in a final effort to spread the word.

"My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven," Grace Haddad, 16, said. "At first it was really upsetting, but it's what she honestly believes."

Abby Haddad Carson and Robert Carson are followers of Harold Camping, a self-styled end times prophet, who claims that his interpretations of the Bible say that the Rapture begins today.

As a result of following Camping's teachings, the Carsons have all but abandoned their teen-aged children, Faith, Grace, and Joseph. The children are of course embarrassed by their parents, but that embarrassment goes beyond the normal awkward teen phases to point to a much deeper problem, where their parents have abandoned the children spiritually, and have consigned them to what they expect to be Hell on Earth.

Literally.

What kind of parent does that? They have told their kids point-blank that "we are going to heaven, and you are not." They have not prepared for their children's future, because they feel they have none. And now the future is here, and they are all awkwardly trapped in a Maryland McMansion, all quite alive, and all quite uncomfortable, one would assume.

The Carson parents have no moral authority over their children anymore. They abandoned them spiritually long ago, and preemptively abdicated all responsibility for their future lives from this moment onward. How can they any longer be effective parents when they have lost their credibility?

This awkward realization is going to impact a very small community of end times believers when the sun comes up today and tomorrow and the day after that as it always has. They're going to realize they were fools.

But are they going to understand why?

Are they going to understand that they fell for Camping's false prophesy because they do not want responsibility over their own lives? Once they make that revelation, will they end their lives in despair, or will they try to get the therapy they need to discover why they are so willing to abandon the lives and children the real God gave to them as the most precious of gifts?

While I fear the former and hope for the later, odds are that many of these weak-willed followers will listen when Camping finds the "error" in his end times math and resets the end of the world several more years or decades into the future (he had already done so once before). They will still follow the false prophesy of a near-time Revelation, and continue to create the Hell on Earth for their families, a fate that they so ironically sought to avoid.