Twenty-five years ago today, I headed out in my car to run a
few errands. A couple of hundred feet from my driveway, I turned around. The solemn
voice on the radio indicated something terrible was happening. I spent the day in front of the television. My husband called me, and we wondered if our son, who’d left
for England only a few days earlier, knew that passenger jets were crashing into
buildings.
Later, I picked up our daughter at middle school. She’d been
watching the TV, too. And
then we all watched it for days. We watched the planes
hit, watched the towers fall, over and over again. As if staring at it would
somehow change things.
The weeks that followed brought a minor cultural shift. I
call it minor because it was not meant to last. It was born of fear and sorrow.
People gathered in patriotism. They mourned as Americans. They went to church. They
stitched up what they could in their broken, posturing dreams. They proclaimed in
unison, “Never forget!”
And then they forgot.
A lasting change occurs not by anxious reactions, but with patient
expectation. It happens over decades. It leads to good—the founding of a nation,
the abolishment of slavery, the protection of the innocent, human rights,
advances in commerce, industry, healthcare, education, communication. But sometimes
what begins as a climb toward improvement drops us into a more broken existence.
With patient expectation, democracy twists into socialism, elections bring
communists to power, anger rules, violence is tolerated, immorality is
normalized, and the law of the land, perhaps, just gives up.
Woe
to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light
and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20
OK, so I’m firmly
planted in my Christian worldview. I still have that right. I’m looking back at
what God once ordained for this unprecedented nation. It’s the will of the people,
apparently, that has changed the view looking forward. So be it. But the building
of a great nation, or its downfall, is no accident. God isn’t surprised.
Any cultural shift contrary to God’s plan does not immediately
deliver us to a destination, but to a doorway. As our nation slips away from its
origin, the degeneration, for some people, is scarcely noticeable. The doorway slowly
opens to grievous acceptability. The destination is where God becomes
irrelevant.
Are we there yet?
If one bright hope for the future in the land of the free
should stand, let it be that the truth of the gospel is not silenced. The USA
has reached the world with the message of redemption, and now that message must
be remembered and spoken within our own transforming nation. In the land of the
false, the truth is still true.
May we never forget it.
