A day of remembrance <3

Russ and I are auditing a Spanish class at our local university this fall.

Last night our profesor encouraged the students to watch the news and pay attention as our nation will surely recount the events of September 11, 2001.

He asked if anyone was alive at the time to even have experienced that day.

A handful of us were.

The rest were either not yet born or infants.

As he shared his own emotional account of the day with his heavy accent still present after twenty years living in this country, the shock and emotions he experienced still rang through his comments.

Trying to explain how we found out via someone watching it on the news and then either calling or telling others in person was so foreign to these kids sitting around us.

It is common to their existence to know what flavor latte a friend just ordered complete with emojis and flashing hearts around it even as the friend drinks it live on an Instagram story.

I see in the paper that it will be taught in some classrooms today and I wonder how you teach that our country has enemies to a one-world, globally minded, let’s all just get along population.

How do you explain to kids who hear every day of our own people killing our own people that we should remember an attack that came from the outside in and ask them to feel some sort of patriotism?

I don’t know.

These young adults have never known life without walking through metal detectors, having to cut through several layers of protection to get to a Tylenol or practicing lock down drills as a routine part of their grade school curriculum.

Our country is torn and polarized and to think this is something new is to forget that there are families in Oklahoma City whose lives were ripped apart on April 19,1995 by some of us killing many of us.

It is to forget that many issues run deep and there are wrong things that have been done and covered up and that there really are enemies of goodness and righteousness and just putting a generic policy of peace and love out there isn’t going to change that.

It is complicated.

Much more complicated than idealistic chatter will ever be able to master.

We are broken and we are bent.

We cannot fix our messes with logic and reasoning and rhetoric.

We cannot change the minds and hearts of those who do not love or honor God.

But we can pray.

We, who love Him and are called by His Name…we, who have laid down our lives to take up His Life through the Cross can apply the words of this scripture…

IF MY PEOPLE…

will humble themselves…

and pray…

and seek My face…

I will hear from heaven…

and I will forgive their sin…

and I will heal and restore their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14

Greatness for a nation will come when God’s people bend low and repent and seek the only One who can truly bring about change…transforming, life-giving….change <3