PRAYER PROMPT ••• Sixteen years ago, I was at work when my boss said, “Denise, did you hear a plane flew into the World Trade Center?”
Like many, 9/11 is a day I cannot forget.
Two years after the towers fell, my friend Amy and I traveled to NYC and with a room overlooking Ground Zero, we got a very raw look at the scars left by that day.
Flash forward to today.
How far removed are we from those days that stirred a sense of patriotism in American hearts and sent floods of people back into churches to seek answers for something that was so incomprehensible.
I look at the America of 2017 and I see a nation determined to erase history and forget the past.
We’re really no different from the Israelites in biblical history.
If you read the Old Testament, those people were as stubborn as we are.
They’d follow God for a while… grow overly confident and content in their ways… they’d start to compromise standards… they’d fall into war or ruin… they’d plead to God for rescue.
It was a vicious cycle then and it’s a vicious cycle now.
I’m not going to talk politics, but you don’t have to bring it up to acknowledge our country is becoming more interested in being right than being neighbors.
America, known for generations as “the melting pot,” has forgotten what that means.
Freedom of speech only applies to those who agree with us.
And it makes my heart sad.
I remember after 9/11, after the dust and chaos settled, we were united as a country.
How soon we forget.
At least the Israelites would go a few decades or hundred years before they forgot.
We couldn’t even make it 20 years.
There are those who say we should only look forward and to some degree, I get it.
The Bible speaks to that too, but those passages are referring to our spiritual lives – God doesn’t want us to beat ourselves up over past mistakes.
That kind of looking backwards prevents us from growing as Christians.
However, Deuteronomy 9:7 says, “Remember and do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the Lord.”
This verse is telling us to remember so we learn from our mistakes.
Acknowledging our past empowers us to move forward; it’s doesn’t cripple us unless we let it.
From the perspective of our spiritual walks, remember past mistakes not to beat yourself up, but to see how far you’ve come and awe at the unbelievable grace of our Savior!
Today, as you pray, remember 9/11 and what it taught you.
Pray for our country; our leaders; our citizens.
Ask God to give us opportunities to remember and learn from our past – both as Americans and as Christians.
Ask Him to give our nation the revival we so desperately need.
