At Dennis's insistence, I gave my heart to Jesus once again. I'm still not sure why the first several times weren't enough. The reasons I did it were that A. I was terrified of the demons, or the idea of them, and B. These Christians believed in the "rapture", wherein a heavenly trumpet sounds, and all the Christians on earth suddenly vanish and are raptured up to heaven. If you haven't been saved by then, things are going to be really, really bad, because once all the Christians are with Jesus, He lets a lot of really awful things happen to the world. The idea of being left all alone, with no family, right when all hell was about to break loose, was terrifying.

I should add here that from the time I was a child, we believed that we would see the end times, the last days, the mark of the beast...all the things written in Revelations would come to pass in our lifetime, and quite possibly before we reached adulthood. We were constantly alert for the signs spoken of in Revelations.

Now that I was saved, it wasn't enough. I had to (they said) tell everyone I met to become a Christian if they didn't want to go to hell. We needed to save the world, because the end was at hand. There was a terribly heavy weight of responsibility...a person's eternal life could hinge on whether I was able to breach my social anxieties and convince them to give their heart to God.