As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, everyone is putting on their wise-retrospective beanies and pontificating about the significance of the twin-towers attack. Now it’s my turn, but first read this:

Guardian WatchBlog

Five years ago, I cared for little outside my own circle of friends and family. Caring was for fools and patriotism mostly nostalgic in nature. I thought that things would continue as they always had. I was unaware of the existence of our enemies or their plans, and blissfully so.

All of that changed in a white-hot second on the morning of 9/11. Like so many other Americans, I was ripped from my comfortable womb and delivered against my will into a world where complete strangers hate me and would happily sacrifice their lives to kill me. Should I have mourned the loss of my ignorance?

I’m not sure that many had such an epiphany on the morning of 9/11 and after, but the writer makes a good point. Everything did change; the political landscape not the least, as the article points out.

I submit that no one with a Christian worldview should have been totally shocked, as so many around us say they were. The fact that people who will gladly sacrifice their lives to kill us without even knowing us should not come as a surprise. There is ugly evil in the world that we see that is being orchestrated in a world that we cannot see. It’s true. Get used to it.

I think we get our eyes opened to the existence of evil in a number of ways. One is learning to accept as reality events like terrorist attacks. Anyone exposed to TV news cannot avoid seeing what is happening in the world, even though most of the nasty stuff still happens on the other side of the world.

There are also a few books around that do a pretty good job of rubbing our noses in reality.

Here’s a gratuitous plug for a series of novels by Joel C. Rosenberg. One of his latest is The Ezekiel Option. How’s this for opening lines? “Boris Stuchenko would be dead in less than nineteen minutes. And he had no idea why.” Those nineteen minutes took only ten pages to arrive, and I would bet that every person reading them started feverishly reading and flipping pages to see what would happen. I’ve read many-many current events thrillers, but never anything like Rosenberg’s stories. He somehow maintains a frantic pace steadily from the first to the last page. Amazing!

I might add that the books are a good family-read; no sexual episodes, no profanity, no heavy-handed moralizing – just fast-paced action that has the ring of truth.

Okay, where was I?

Oh, yes. Most of us need a wake-up call of some sort, expecially if we live comfy lives in the Western world. Until we come to grips with the fact of evil in the world (and the answer to it), we are pitifully vulnerable to those times, prayerfully few, when evil stares us right in the face. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Dave, pontificating from his own little cocoon of safety.