Here’s a wonderfully compassionate open pastoral letter from Tim Dalrymple to all those who believed in Harold Camping’s rapture prediction. An excerpt:

Tonight the Rapture Parties will go on. The atheists will gloat, the mockers will mock. Yet there’s nothing funny about this for you. You are broken and crestfallen, left abandoned in the ruins of unfulfilled expectations, among them the very highest expectations a human can have — the hope of union with God, the hope of a world made new, the hope that every tear will be wiped away. You are left disoriented. You were so sure of this. People you love and respect — perhaps your parents, your pastor, your mentor, your brother and sister — may have believed it too. You do not feel relieved that the end of the world did not arrive. You are not rid of this world yet, so all of its weight fell back upon your shoulders.

So let’s reflect on this together. First, what can be affirmed? What were you right to feel and to believe?