A Wake-Up Call to Become Global Christians
"The deadly attacks on America will provoke many responses, but Christians are commanded to love our neighbors."
Miriam Adeney | posted 9/01/2001 12:00AM
How do we respond to the devastation of September 11, deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Many responses come to mind. Prayer. Care for the injured and bereft. Increased security, increased vigilance. Just punishment for the masterminds behind the carnage, if we can find them. Sharper on-the-ground intelligence-gathering. Stronger international cooperation against terrorism. Congregational immersion in Scripture stories of God's people who lived through radical loss and destabilization, from Joseph to Daniel to John, Peter, and Paul.
Hit in the solar plexus
This disaster is a wake-up call. Since the so-called end of the Cold War, many of us have not given much thought to the rest of the world except as occasional business, tourist, or short-term mission connections. Those days are over. We've been hit in the solar plexus with the truth that that we are globally connected and cannot cut loose.
Businessmen already know that. In Thomas Friedman's bestseller on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he describes a label on a computer part that reads, "This part was made in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, China, Mexico, Germany, the U.S., Thailand, Canada, and Japan. It was made in so many different places that we cannot specify a country of origin." Through the Internet many Americans have also tapped into a common global shopping system and global library. We are globally integrated as never before.
Yet many of us continue to live cocooned in own little circle of friends, walled off from people who are different. To think about the rest of the world overwhelms us. Masses of data pour out of the media, jumbled in sound bites that juxtapose great human tragedies with beer ads. We know Americans overseas have made mistakes. We know missionaries have. How can ordinary citizens like you and me know enough to make intelligent comments on global issues?
"Whenever I think about those people over there, I worry," says my friend Susan. "And I know God doesn't want me to be worried. So I've decided He doesn't want me to think about them." Another friend named Janet says that's why she doesn't read the newspaper anymore. The news disturbs her, and surely that isn't the will of God.
Our ignorance has come home to haunt us
In this we reflect our society's disconnect from the rest of the world. Consider this. Well before the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, where six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, the FBI was in possession of some of the plans. The Agency held videotapes, manuals and notebooks on bomb making that had been seized from one of the plotters. They also had taped phone conversations in which one terrorist told another how to build the bomb.
"There was one problem: They were in Arabic. And nobody who understood Arabic listened to them until after the explosion at the Trade Center," according to New York Times reporter Diana Schemo.
Last year all the colleges and universities in the U.S. graduated only nine students who majored in Arabic. There is a joke making the rounds:
What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks one language?
American.
Now our ignorance has come to home to haunt us.
Pray through the newspaper
Of all people, Christians are to love our neighbors. When our neighborhood expands to include the globe, then we're called to love globally. How? Some of the most important steps may be some of the simplest.
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