You're A Religious Older Woman in a Stephen King Novel! What's Going To Happen To You?

• The crowd despises you, and hates what you have to say! Shut up, you miserable old lady!!! No one wants to hear it!
• You do not care if people yell at you! If people want you to stop talking, that is not going to bother you at all. You do not suffer from social anxiety, and when you realize you are unpopular, it only reinforces the strength of your previously-held beliefs!
• Your speeches are going to get increasingly strident, that's for darn sure!!
• Well I can tell you right now that you're going to get at least one very triumphant moment where it looks like you were right after all!!!
• The crowd is going to start thinking, maybe you were on to something with all that biblical talk! Tell us again about the Lord's wrath, you miserable old lady! Some of us want to hear it!
• You are pretty sure that the Lord is not happy!
• You are going to use a curse word one time, either right before you are horribly killed, or in the middle of a huge fight with a less religious woman whose reputation is tarnished but who works damn hard for her kids and doesn't look down her nose at anyone
• Once you've won a critical mass of the crowd to your side you are going to start introducing novel ideas to your Christian worldview including, but not limited to, a new kind of sacrificial system, a brand-new messiah or devil, a previously-undisclosed desire of God's for everyone to cut off one foot or something equally weird, without ever acknowledging any inconsistency with your previous orthodoxy! Yesterday you might have been a Methodist, but today you're a firm believer in continuous revelation!*
• The first time you see something belonging to All-World beyond your comprehension? Well, you're simply going to shut your eyes to it and move along. That's none of your business, and besides that it's nothing at all
• The second time you see something belonging to All-World beyond your comprehension? Well, now it's time to try to incorporate it into your already-established religious worldview, while trying to hide the mounting terror in your voice!
• You're going to find an unexpected cache of C-4 explosives, is what you're going to do!
• If your religiosity is of a more melancholic and inward bent, you may end your own life after participating in a legal cover-up
• If you cannot be persuaded to feel guilt, you will start a wonderful cult in a gas station or something where everyone has to murder people who drive Buicks to keep in God's good favor
• These MIGRAINES are a SIGN OF GOD'S FAVOR
• Honestly what's one more murder in the grand scheme of things?
• And so what if I have been cooking a little meth on the side from time to time. The Good Lord's not against making money
• If you must die at the hands of monsters, you're certainly not going to admit you might have been wrong!!
• You're going to see something more wondrous and beautiful than you could ever have imagined but then it's going to start to look really fucked up!!
• And you're certainly not going to admit that you have ever been afraid!
• You are either going to die in the gibbering throes of terrified madness, as afraid as any living creature has ever been, or in full and majestic denial that you have ever been afraid even once for three seconds, with no in between
• Skin-Man's a-coming
• Demons can't hurt you, since you have God's favor; therefore it is fine to touch the orb whether or not you have blood on your hands, because the only blood that matters is the blood of Christ
• Ah! well, nevertheless –

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

*See Article IV of the United Methodist Confession of Faith.