The Apocalypse Is Coming! Repent Now! This Is Your Last Chance!

I haven't shaven in more than a week. Been drinking for days. I am making my signs and placards. You can find me on the corner of Franklin and Washington in virtually any majour metropolitan area. Remember to do your best to ignore me. To you, I don't exist. The message and messenger both meaningless.... insignificant. Their delivery an effort in futility.

Can you imagine being struck by the impact of something so profoundly that you feel compelled to share it? Can you imagine being "crazy enough" to invite shame and ridicule? Have you tasted such madness before? Have you known such passion?

Maybe you don't even have to imagine the power of such a message. Maybe you know both the impact of such an overwhelming feeling of necessity in having a message be delivered by you, as well as that messages insignificance to others. Maybe you know what it feels like to carry the most important message the world will ever see while also realizing at the same time that no one else cares. Really, they don't.

Is there anyone more ridiculed than the madman who thinks he has a message to share about the "end of the world?" This is clearly someone who does not know his place. While the common vagrant merely pushes his or her stolen shopping cart down the street---the one loaded with all of their belongings, from the cardboard shell to the dingy throw-away blankets, from the bottles as empty as their dreams to the stale bread collected from yet another alley's dumpster---the madman with a message actually is deluded into believing that his voice matters; that God would speak to him.

How ballsy, eh? Someone who cannot just put his or her head down and refuse to make eye contact with the public. Someone who cannot just beg and panhandle for spare change. Someone with enough gall to imagine that they have something important to share with others: a message, and a very important at that. Now that's balls.

How passionate does one have to be to stand and deliver a message like that in the face of overwhelming disgust and ridicule? Talk about faith. Being rejected more than a zit-faced 13-year old at his first High School Dance and still holding one's ground is something that I don't feel a lot of us can understand fully. To have no one talk you seriously, while you believe you are delivering the most important message the world has ever known.

I bet even a mustard seed dreams of having as much faith as the haggard old man donning his placards and heading out to the street corner to be ignored. In fact, even I am dreaming of one day having that much faith.