Tears come to my eyes... Memories flicker through my mind...

The night I was baptized in '99 and everyone else was celebrating the new millennium, I hugged my stockpile of ramen noodles and waited for 'the day' to come. And then... nothing happened. The young woman who had stuck with her faith through thick and thin eventually left the church, and overnight became a "foolish believer waiting for the right time. But the church that told us not to wait for the end of the world is telling us that now is the time.

When I tried to apply for graduate school, my deacon said, "Why dream when God is coming soon," so I gave up. He said, "This year is different, you can go if you preach hard," so I got a part-time job and preached like crazy, but the end of the world didn't come, so I was stuck both worldly and spiritually.

The church was looking for people to serve as "experts" in public. I still remember being scolded for opening a book and trying to study, saying, "What are you doing when the world is about to end?" How could I study professionally in that environment? I can still see how church evangelists would come to him every New Year's Day and proclaim that this was the year he would go to heaven. Thanks to the evangelists, I was there for a long time, pretending to be obedient, and I lost my reason.