In Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood," we find the pious-of-a-different-sort Hazel Moats with stones in his shoes and self-placed barbed wire tied around his belly in a bizarre stigmata ritual.
When told that people aren't doing that sort of thing anymore, Hazel replies to the effect of, "people are still doing it as long as I'm doing it."
Another day and we're all still here.
Will the believers of yesterday's Rapture prediction soldier on, or will they turn away? It's hard to have much sympathy for those who quit their jobs and liquidated their life savings (some to Harold Camping's ministry) to prepare for this nonevent.
Most of the media, the atheists and just about everyone else will ridicule them as gullible crackpots.
But what about the others?
The devout who still believe and are the you-can't-pin-down-the-Rapture-date Christians. The millions of those run-of-the-mill souls who got up and went to church today because it's what they do every Sunday. Those who think faith will be rewarded.
In it's own time.
As believers, they now face an even more uphill climb in the eyes of a cynical, hard world.
An awfully massive leap of faith, if you will.
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