Truly Historical Moments

In church last Sunday the preacher showed a few minutes of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. I love that speech and it got me thinking about what it must have been like to be there. Did the listeners at the time have a sense that this was one of those ‘history in the making’ moments, when you know that the world will never quite be the same again?

It got me thinking about those moments that I have witnessed live (through a TV screen) when I realised that something truly historical was happening. There are plenty of great sporting moments that I remember, but not that really changed the world, and there are many other moments that I did not see or hear live, but heard about later that day (such as the release of Terry Waite). The two that came to mind were:

1. Seeing Nelson Mandela get out of the car and walk those final few yards to the gate of the Victor Verster prison. I was only about 14 at the time but news images of my childhood had often included those of the struggle against apartheid. I didn’t understand much about him but I knew something important had changed in the world.
2. Seeing the first tower on fire after a plane had crashed into it on the morning of 11th Sept 2001. I was working at a computer hardware company and a colleague was working on trying to program a particular circuit board into a video receiver. It was early afternoon (in the UK) he’d set up a tv in the office and the first picture he got was of a smoking tower. We initially thought it was some action movie. The tv then got set up properly, in time for the second plane to hit the second tower, and then to see the tower collapse. After that I didn’t want to watch any more. Again, a sense that the world had somehow fundamentally changed.

I’d be interested to hear what other people’s historical moments were. The rules are that you have to have seen it live (been there or on tv).

Martin Luther King on nations coming back to God

I’ve just been reading Martin Luther King’s ‘The Measure of a Man’. In it, King mentions the story of the prodigal son, in which a son demands his inheritance from his fathers estate even though his father is still alive, leaves home, squanders the money and comes home begging for forgiveness. The father welcomes him home as a son who “was dead but is now alive” and before the son can even ask for forgiveness, he is embraces by his loving father. Martin Luther King responds to this story in applying it to the civil rights issues of his day:

This is the glory of our religion: that when man decides to rise up from his mistakes, from his sin, from his evil, there is a loving God saying, ‘Come home, I still love you’…

It seems that I can hear a voice saying to America: “You started out right. You wrote in your Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ But America, you strayed away from that sublime principle. You left the house of your great heritage and strayed away into a far country of segregation and discrimination. You have trampled over sixteen million of your brothers. You have deprived them of the basic goods of life You have taken away from them their self respect and their sense of dignity. You have treated them as if they were things rather than persons. Because of this a famine has broken out in your land. In the midst of all your material wealth, you are spiritually and morally poverty-stricken, unable to speak to the conscience of this world. America, in the famine situation, if you will come to yourself and rise up ad decide to come back home, I will take you in, for you are made for something high and something noble and something good.” (p19-20)

This applied very clearly to the civil rights movement of MLK’s day. I wonder how it applies to the western world today. Perhaps God sees the material wealth of the West and compares it to the poverty of the developing world and weeps for them. Perhaps he sees that the current global food crisis id driven by the western worlds desire for ever cheaper material goods and ever cheaper oil. Perhaps he sees what we are doing to His environment, again due to the desire for economic success. Perhaps there are many more… What would he have us do?

I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of each of these situations or how they can be fixed, but I’m sure God grieves over them.