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On September 11 and in the days immediately following, many people – politicians, grieving families and those of us just watching on television – turned to prayer. Here was something we instinctively knew we couldn’t handle on our own. Attendance at Christian churches throughout North America jumped by at least 6% (some surveys say 16% or more) on the Sunday following Sept. 11. Sales of the Bible in some stores jumped 30%.
Of course, in the weeks that followed, church attendance began to decline again toward previous levels. Many people will now forget about God – until the next disaster strikes and they realize again that they need help. Ron Graham, writing about the Sept. 11 tragedy in Maclean’s magazine Dec. 17, 2001, observed, “In our sorrow, we were convinced that nothing would ever be the same, least of all ourselves. . . . We made vows, as earnest as New Year’s resolutions, to rearrange our priorities, reassess our values, become wiser and kinder, because life is brief and leads only to the tomb. For days following my father’s funeral, I remember, I went around the city giving $10 bills to every homeless person I met. But that generosity passed and I slipped back into my stingy habits. Life soon felt normal again because I hadn’t really changed within.”
Self-help books and seminars abound in our society. We are told that if we just apply ourselves, we can cure our weight problem, improve our attitude, raise good kids, achieve our goals, become famous, get rich. Deep down, we know it is a lie. We need help, and we can’t make it on our own. Every Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-step program to overcome addictions begins with the admission that we are powerless to control our own lives and that we need the help of an accountability group and a “Higher Power”.
This is scarcely a new discovery. Written thousands of years ago, the Bible says that God created human beings in the plural because “it is not good . . . to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). We can’t make it on our own because we were not designed to make it on our own. We need the help of other human beings, and we need the help of God. We need God to carry us through our grieving, to forgive the things we have done wrong, to overcome our weaknesses and to replace our anger with love. We were created to live in relationship to the loving God who created us. As the Christian writer Augustine prayed to God, “You have created us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
The main articles in this issue of Encounter were written by Jim Coggins, editor of Encounter, and James Toews, senior pastor of Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, B.C.
“If you do not believe in a personal God, the question ‘What is the purpose of life?’ is unaskable and unanswerable. To whom or what would you address the question?”
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings |
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