The Day Before

I was on sick leave from my government job, laying on a crazy coral colored couch my friends the Batlucks had given me. It was second hand and had probably passed through a lot of hands before theirs yet I'd had it shipped from Jersey with my new job location six years earlier and was laying on it now with a beagle who wasn't sure it was up to her standards anymore.

I was flipping through the channels with a carelessness that only men can have when I saw it. The World Trade Center and a plane that looked like a large wasp sailing by. An uneasyness worse than the nausea that had kept me home grabbed my stomach. It was too close to be some lost pilot.

Then a few minutes later a second plane appeared. "An act of war", I heard myself say as I grabbed the phone and called my boss, a full-bird colonel chaplain, as if he could do anything. As if I were the only witness to this horror being broadcast around the country. His secretary, my friend Jo, answered. "Calm down, Paul", she said. "You're overreacting." I shouted incoherently like Donald Duck for a few minutes trying to show how calm I was before giving up and letting her off the phone. The planes had hit. The decimation had begun.

I had called as an eyewitness and my friend wouldn't believe me. What would have happened if I had called the day before? Who remembers where they were or what they were doing at 9 am on 9/10 rather than 9/11?

I wonder if JESUS had a wry smile on His face as He told the story in Luke 16:31 of the man who begged that a man come back from the dead and warn his brothers of the hell that he was in. JESUS, who would rise from the dead a short time later Himself, was quoting Abraham's response that if they did not believe the word of GOD (through Moses and the prophets) some people would not even believe a man who rose from the dead.

Over and over again JESUS would tell people "Truly, truly I tell you" and "if it were not so I would have told you." Yet few believed Him. Believers say it now. The same words that have been laughed at since the days when JESUS first said them and before. This world and all its charms are passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:31) There is coming a day of disaster that will make the collapse of the World Trade Centers look like the teacup ride at Disney World. But few believe Him, His Word (the Bible) or those of us who believe in Him and it and tell them about that day.

Today is your day before. It may be the day before your death. It may be the day before the end, before another terrorist strike, nuclear war, or the greatestday of your life. The only way to take hold of that day is to take hold of eternity now. "Behold this is the day of Salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2). Take hold of what JESUS has done for you, forever, by His giving you eternal life in place of the devastation you made of yours through your rebellion and sin. The madness of your choices, the terrorists of your heart obeying the enemy of your soul, destroyed your chances of life with GOD more surely than those planes demolished those towers. But JESUS, GOD in flesh, came to give you eternity back Home with the Father long after this world is gone. Maybe that eternal day will be tomorrow. Will you believe JESUS today?