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Pre-Empted

© Blake Atwood

We interrupt your regular broadcast to bring you this news bulletin.

The world has changed.

I had planned to continue with my articles about the differences between modern and postmodern thought and how that affects the church, but like everything else in our lives, this has changed.

I’d rather talk about words. Seems redundant I know.

Words have the power to create and the power to destroy.
Words helped to create the Tower of Babel.
Words helped to destroy the World Trade Towers.

The Bible says the earth’s inhabitants once possessed a unified language. Such a united humanity was able to accomplish such a momentous task, to build a Tower to the Heavens. Even God got scared. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (NIV).” You can check that story out in Genesis 11:1-9.

You know too well the other story.
I just wish it was a movie, “reel” life, and not real life.
A plane,
buildings crumbling,
people dying,
mourning,
weeping,
praying,
uniting,
caring,
giving,
hoping,
living.

Words destroyed the towers.

Words repeated so often they became meaningless mantras.
Words used to infect the minds of religious zealots.
Words used to turn “civilians, women, and children” into “targets.”
Words that turned “suicide” into “glorious martyrdom.”
Words that turned “hatred” into “piety.”
Words that would not bear their bad seed until the awful morning of September 11th, 2001.

But words will help to create a new America, one much, much more aware of itself in the global scene. One hopefully more aware of other atrocities in other countries in the global scene.

This new America is beginning to understand words long forgotten. We’re beginning to regain a sense of national pride. We’re beginning to have the same definitions for what we call “freedom” and “justice.”

We’re beginning to speak the same language.

Is God afraid?

I don’t think so. I believe He knows what He’s doing, as hard as that is for me to grasp, or even want to grasp at a time like this.

But if I weren’t God, and I were a part of the group responsible for these atrocities, I’d be scared to death. Literally.

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