To those of us who watched no one get raptured

Hi,

Well, I guess we were right… whatever that means. The world spins on, and we on it.

No rapture, no earthquakes, no loud procession of angels with trumpets and swords and a rolling red carpet from heaven with the Messiah descending on it.

Yeah, we sure were right about nothing happening! Everyone gets a gold star by their name on that one! Yep…

But now there sits before us a question; what happens with the many people who did believe yesterday was “The End”? How are those people who spent their own wealth and energy, only to be misled in the end by bad teaching, waking up this morning? What about those  who are genuinely hurting this morning, asking some serious questions about their own faith and family? What about the children who were in these families, and who are now caught in a crossfire of what they were taught, and what has happened? Could there be people who believed so much in this false claim that they gave everything they did have away?

The reality is, yes, there are.

So what do we do now?

Are they the butt of our jokes now? Do we have enough twitter fodder and Facebook one-liners  from their mistake to satiate our thirst for sarcasm and irony?

Is this where they get their just desserts, they learn their lesson? Then, once they’ve learned, they can rejoin good, orthodox, Christian society? Do we throw a, “reap what you sow” Bible verse at them, as we head to church this morning?

Or, is now the time to show them grace? Is now the time to find the hurting, and listen to their stories, to bring them into our homes for meals and rest, and to help with the things that they might have lost in the name of something that they got wrong?

Now is the time that we should quit shooting our wounded. Now is the time to show compassion over legalism and self-righteousness. Now is the time that love really needs to win.

The reality is, the media, the internets, and the majority of the world are dumping all over those who believed yesterday was the rapture (when it’s a joke on SNL on the day of, you know it’s not small potatoes). We have a moment in which we can choose to be different.

Confession: I’ve been wrong before – dead wrong. Maybe I didn’t claim it was the end of the earth, but I’ve made some decisions in my life that were out-and-out stupid, and dangerous, and the people closest to me told me they were such.

But I still made them.

And, in the aftermath, I’ve experienced two responses that I’ve just mentioned; people preached my brokenness to my face (and my back), and people came up closer beside me and walked with me as I journeyed back from my own valley of failure.

Which response echoed and transformed my life more? Which one would you rather happen to you when you  completely blow it?

Yesterday might not have been the rapture, but our decisions and actions today will decide if we will show heaven on earth, or if we just let the earth spin on, with we on it.