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Talk to the people who were already inclined to read omens in the headlines, and you hear their excitement, even eagerness to see what happens next. "We sense we are very close to something apocalyptic, but that something positive will come out of it," says Doron Schneider, an Evangelical based in Jerusalem. "It's like a woman having labor pains. A woman can feel this pain reaching its height when the child is born--and then doesn't feel the pain anymore, only the joy of the happy event." Even the horror of Sept. 11 was experienced differently by people primed to see God's hand in all things. Strandberg admits that he was "joyful" that the attacks could be a sign that the End Times were at hand. "A lot of prophetic commentators have what I consider a phony sadness over certain events," he says. "In their hearts they know it means them getting closer to their ultimate desire."
People who were strangers to prophecy don't always find as much comfort there. When Dave Cheadle, a Denver lay pastor at an inner-city ministry, sent out an Internet letter after 9/11 suggesting that Revelation was the relevant text for understanding what was happening, he got a huge--and frightened--response: "People were asking themselves whether they were ready to die. Very sane, well-educated people have gone back to the storm-cellar thing to make sure they have water and freeze-dried stuff in their basements." Some had trouble reconciling their warm image of a merciful God with the chilling warnings they were reading. "They're asking people to believe that we have a God who simply can't wait to zap the Christian flight crew out of jets so they crash?" asks Paul Maier, a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University and an author of Christian fiction, who finds in the Left Behind books a deity he does not recognize. "You can't believe in a God who would do this kind of thing."
Others, already believers, have come away from this past winter feeling a need to change tactics, change jobs, find a new way to get the urgent message across. Rick Scarborough, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, a Houston suburb, resigned his pulpit this month to put all his energy into recruiting Christians to become politically involved. "I am mobilizing Christians and getting more Christians to vote. I am preparing a beachhead of righteousness," he says. Meanwhile Wyoming state senator Carroll Miller, a popular legislator from Big Horn County, announced his retirement from politics in part so that he could spend more time speaking at churches and men's clubs, helping people come to grips with the prospect of the Second Coming. "It's very important that we as a Christian nation know what the Scriptures have said about these days," he says. "I'm putting forth my personal effort for my own sake as well as for my family and friends."