One might have thought that our descent into paranoia about objects as innocent as stuffed bunnies and children's clothing printed with hearts, coupled with frantic prayers on a regular basis to keep evil spirits away, was about as kooky as people could get. That would be incorrect. We were in fact merely on the edge of a precipice, but we didn't know that. We thought everyone else was misguided. After all, the Bible has a lot to say about a path so narrow that few would find it, that many would claim to know Jesus (oops, Yahshua) only to be cast into the lake of fire. We knew that many were called and few are chosen, and we were absolutely certain that we were the chosen ones. It could have been that the stress of our life was getting to all of us. Maybe we'd read the story of Samuel a few too many times. Perhaps we were taking the Bible too literally.

It was evening, and we were all in our rooms. My sisters were probably listening to Amy Grant and chatting about girl stuff. I was probably reading a book or drawing. We didn't hear anyone call Mike. But he did. He ran downstairs, but Denis claimed he hadn't called him. By the third time, both Mike and Denis were frustrated. But then Denis thought of the boy Samuel. He instructed Mike to go back upstairs. If anyone called him this time, he should stay there, and say "Here am I", and listen closely. Mike obeyed these odd directions, went back upstairs...and was soon back down again, breathless.
"He said, Your name is!" Mike gasped. Mom and Denis waited, but that was all Mike said.
"Your name is what?" , they asked.
"I don't know, he didn't say! He just said your name is".

So they told him to return upstairs and wait for the rest. When he came back downsatirs, slowly, he looked puzzled. He asked if Raphah was a name. They weren't sure, so they looked it up. It was. It meant "heals" as in, "Yahweh heals". It was decided that Yahweh had spoken to Mike and his name was to be changed to Raphah. We all wondered whether Mike's name was the only one to be changed. Would the rest of us get new names, too? The Bible said we would. We were all instructed to go to our rooms and pray to see what our names were.
I wasn't big on the idea of hearing voices. How would I know if it were my own thoughts or not? Usually when they wanted me to pray for an answer, all I heard was silence and my own worrying fears about what would happen if I came back down with no answer at all. So I asked for the name to show on the first page the Bible randomly opened to. If no female names were on that page, obviously I wouldn't be getting a new name. The Bible opened to the story of Rebekah in Genesis. Was Rebekah my name? I tried it again, and again the book opened to that page. I went downstairs and told them my name was Rebekah. They told me they already knew, Lisa, who would be Sarah now, had heard that Rebekah was my new name. Gia was now Rachel. Mom went from Mary to Miriam, and Denis was now Eliyah, a name which pleased him mightily since he related to the fierce, judgmental prophet Elijah.

Since Lisa/Sarah was good at hearing from Yahweh, they had other questions for her. The rest of us were to retire to our room and give thanks for our new names and sing praises to Yahweh for gracing us with these gifts. The excitement was so keen that nobody could sleep. There was a lot of whispering and quiet talking downstairs between Mom, Denis, and Sarah. A few days later, the news was broken to the rest of us: another prophecy had been received.

The prophecy stated that Mom was going to have another baby. This in itself would have been miraculous, since her tubes had been tied years ago, but it didn't stop there. This baby was going to be special. He was going to be the prophet Elijah reborn in the flesh. The book of Malachi states that before the end, Yahweh will send the prophet Elijah. The end times were near, and Yahweh was sending the prophet Elijah- to us! To our family! We were beside ourselves with jubilation. The prophecy also stated that we were to notify all of our friends and family of this news, so that it would be a sign to them, and that it would also be an indication that our names truly had been changed. Mom promptly wrote up the letters and had us all sign with our new names. We sent them to all our our family. Oh, and one other detail: we were to have complete faith, we must not doubt for a second, that baby Eliyah was coming to us.

Remembering to use our new names took some getting used to. It was particularly difficult to get other people to use the new names. Mark was an exception. He adapted with very little argument or explanation, probably having already decided our parents were crazy. The prophecy about Baby Eliyah was a much more difficult issue, especially for people who knew that Mom's tubes were tied.
Other things were changing, too. The landlord was visiting us a lot, having what seemed to be serious discussions with our parents which we were not permitted to listen to. More importantly from our family's perspective, the prophecies hadn't stopped with our new names and the news of Baby Eliyah. We were all frequently employed to pray and ask Yahweh about answers to various questions. Often we didn't even know what the question was, they would just tell us to go ask Yahweh what to do. We didn't need to know the question because He knew it. I had a harder time hearing Yahweh than the others. Even when I thought I might hear something, I suspected it was my own imagination, imagining what might get me out of the predicament of waiting in a quiet room for a hour or two trying to come up with answers to questions I didn't know of. I began imagining Yahweh telling us that our trials on earth were really pretty trivial in the greater scheme of things, and that we should simply praise him for the wonderful things he would do for us, and for the small blessings we had. A typical reply of this nature might read:

"Behold, my beloved children, why do you worry about things of the world? Do I not care for all of creation? Trust ye me not? I say unto thee, not a sparrow falls to the ground, nor doth a balde of grass groweth without my knowledge of it. Trust ye in me, my children! Sing praises unto me and be glad! Thus saith Yahweh thy Creator and father."

This got me off the hook of agonizing over answers, worrying whether I was hearing my own mind, tormented by parental stress and pressure, or Yahweh, or maybe it was Satan or an evil spirit trying to deceive us. If I wrote down a false reply, I would be a false prophet deserving of death. My sister Sarah had far more fruitful results, a fact which was not lost on my parents. She was considered more obedient and closer to Yahweh even before the prophecies started. My new name, Rebekah, meant "to bind with beauty", but the common translation was "yoke", and they often agreed that I was definitely a yoke and a burden, even when introducing me to people we'd just met. "This is Rebekah. Her name means yoke, she has a rebellious spirit and is a burden". They felt I was rebellious because I always, continuously, thought outside of the box they wanted to cram me into. They spent a lot of time trying to cast the rebellious spirit out of me.
I didn't realize it at the time, but our situation was becoming increasingly desperate and untenable. Denis couldn't seem to find a job, Mom never looked for one, the rent was a few months late, and our frozen bread, TVP, dried foods, and the venison Mark shot for us was virtually all we had to eat...except for the omnipresent lentils and oatmeal. Still, Denis found a way to have his coffee, his eggs cooked in real butter and his steak, all served, of course, on his favorite plate with the silverware that only he was allowed to use.