Kind of, sort of, secretly wondering, "Hey, what if the world does end on May 21?"

If you're reading this right now, then the world did not end on May 21. Or it did end and you're in heaven and the official blog is Stuff Christians Like! Hooray!

But you knew the rapture wasn't going to happen on May 21. If you're at all like me, a biped with a sense of humor, you laughed a little about the groundswell of conversation about the world ending on May 21.

The minister who was predicting it had predicted this same exact thing in 1994. Now in 2011, he was back with a new wave of billboards and devoted followers handing out flyers warning about the rapture date. You didn't think it was going to happen. You knew it wasn't going to happen on that date and probably quoted the same verse I did, Matthew 24:36 "No one knows about that day or hour. Not even the angels in heaven know. The son does not know. Only the father knows."

And yet …

I cracked one slow eye on Saturday morning to see if I was still here when I awoke. I opened the blinds to see if there was anyone out and about or if I had been left behind or Lahayed Behind as I like to say. I didn't run anywhere. I promise I didn't sprint across our backyard, jump the fence and bang on our neighbor's front door to verify that we were all still here. But last Friday, as I sat in the Orlando airport reading the media coverage of it, I thought, "I'm glad I'm headed home today because if is the last day, I want to spend it with my wife and kids." And do you know why I thought that? Do you know who I blame?

Noah.

Whenever I bump into something that feels a little crazy, or outside the norm, my first reaction is skepticism. My second reaction is to blog about it. And my third is to think, "Yeah, but people laughed at Noah too."

For 120 years, he hammered away at a boat in a land that had never seen rain. For 120 years he did something silly. Forget hosting a website about the end of the world or paying for billboards, Noah spent 120 years building an ark of unbelievable scale in front of an unbelieving crowd.

Then he wrangled animals. Mammal by mammal, reptile by reptile, unicorn by, well that one did not work out, but we still got the Narwhal! For 120 years he did that while his friends and neighbors put him on blast on whatever was the Old Testament version of Twitter. (Graffiti on papyrus? Insults on chiseled rocks? Hard to say.) And then it started to rain.

Which is why I have a hard time not throwing the "Noah Card" on myself when I doubt. Did I stay up until midnight so that I could jump into the air for the rapture like the guy who could fly on the show Heroes instead of floating up out of bed asleep? No. But did I throw the Noah card at least once on Friday, May 20? Maybe.

Question:

What did you think about the whole "world is going to end on May 21" situation?