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Fields of Mercy
- Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction
- Michigan State University Press
- Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2001
- pp. 123-131
- 10.1353/fge.2013.0423
- Article
- Additional Information
Fields of Mercy Ladette Randolph I first heard the story ofArmageddon from my best friend's stepfather. A Southerner with a Southerner's sense of drama and elaboration, he told us about the book of Revelation without equivocation. This was going to happen, every bit ofit, just the way St. John had seen it in his vision on the Island ofPatmos. The graves would open, the dead would rise. A hellish cast of characters would cause the world endless suffering: the dragon, the beast, the Antichrist. At fourteen I was primarily concerned with the suffering described in the story and did not take much note of the promises for eternal peace and bUss that would foUow the years oftribulation. Though deeply impressed, I wasn't certain at first if I believed the story. At home I asked my parents about it. They were obviously displeased, but they confirmed that what I had heard was aU there in the book of Revelation. They too believed in a Uteral interpretation of the book, though they never talked about it, and seemed to feel it wasn't a fit subject for children's ears or for discussion with other church people. With an adolescent's preoccupation with the grotesque, I became fascinated . I was drawn to the detaüs of the prophesied end of time in much the way I was drawn to horror movies. The deUcious sensation ofbeing scared out ofmy wits fit in perfecdy with the intensity ofemotion I was experiencing in other areas of my fife in those years. My church friends and I obsessed about the spectacular end we imagined. We recounted the gruesome detaüs. It wasn 't only us, however, for the early seventies marked an increased fascination with predictions ofthe apocalypse. DavidWilkerson, famous for his book The Cross and the Switchblade, wrote a book detafling his own vision for the end times, apdy titled The Vision. He claimed he had seen a vision that indicated the end was very near at hand. There were other books written by conservative believers, one more graphic and wondrously detailed than the next. I 123 124Fourth Genre bought them all, and I loved them. I was waiting for the inevitable end, hoping , as the |)re-mflleniaUsts prophesied, that beUevers would be taken up—raptured —before the seven years of tribulation began. But just in case I had to suffer through the tribulation, I also read Richard Wormbrand's Torturedfor Christ, a graphic testimony of his ordeal behind bars in a communist block country; Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place, an account of her years in a Nazi concentration camp because of her family's role in hiding Jews (which they saw as their Christian duty); and a book by a female doctor (the tide escapes me now), a missionary in the Congo, who was raped and driven from her camp by the "heathen natives." I was riveted by these accounts offaith and endurance in Ught of the quickly approaching end of time, and I was consumed with reUgious fervor, set to become a martyr for Christ. Conversion stories fascinated me as weU. They were the stories I gathered from the adults I knew, from testimonials at church camp and revival meetings . I coUected these stories and retold them to friends. It was inevitable that I began to evangefize, bringing numerous friends into the church because of my influence. (To my amazement, all of those converts have stayed in the church twenty-five years later while I, the evangelist, have left.) ? I was a precocious believer. By five I was singing solos in church, and at six I was baptized by immersion. Because the individual must choose to receive this form of baptism, which in my church (Christian Church) was believed essential for salvation, there were at first doubts that my six-year-old mind had grasped the enormity ofthat step. Mine was a farm family.We lived near the great Sandhills ofNebraska, a stark landscape. There were no neighbor chüdren. No parks. No museums. It was an austere place where I grew up, and I was a child who wanted to sing and dance, to play the piano...