California-based Christian broadcaster Harold Camping predicted that the world would end May 21. As all who are now reading this know, it didn’t.

Without a doubt, many of you were unaware this event was going to take place. You played Frisbee with friends in the park, went to your day job, or lounged around in your pajamas watching TV. I am sure you had a wonderful Saturday, but apparently we need to start the countdown, because the rapture has been rescheduled to October 21st.

This is now the third time the Family Radio founder has predicted Judgment Day, his first one being in 1994. Many people hear about how the end of the world is coming and they start counting down their days. Others think it is all a scam and laugh it off.

When New York Magazine asked Camping if he was concerned that it might not occur on May 21st, he simply said, “It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. I don’t even think about those kind of issues. The Bible is not — God is not playing games. I don’t even want to think about that question at all. It is going to happen.” Yet the Bible clearly says, in black and white, in any version you read:

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. Matthew 24:36

Many people try to predict the end of the world, whether using the stars, calendars, earthquakes, weather patterns, the economic downfall of countries, or justifying that bad behavior can contribute to the demise of our planet. Believers talk about how the incident in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina was, according to some, an act of God in order to punish the bad deeds of the city.

Professors, pastors, and professionals will be predicting the end of the world as long as there is breath in their lungs. They want their ideas to catch on like wildfire and sweep the nation with fear, and to become famous overnight. People do such an act in order to get their five minutes of fame. Let these men quibble, and feel a sense of importance, but do not let their words paralyze you. Are you going to stop taking chances, not ask that girl on a date, miss an interview, blow all of your money on trivial things?

People will live in fear looking at the clock, realizing as the number changes that is one less minute they will have. After a plethora of paralyzed minutes pass, then, and only then, will they reach out and seize the day. Any day could be our last. We could die from natural causes or a freak accident. There is no sense living in fear, because then you are not living. A famous quote from the 1992 film “Strictly Ballroom” simply puts this all into perspective: “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”