A Place of Refuge

by Gene Shelburne

September 11 opened a new chapter in the American experience. We’re thinking differently since then, and we don’t like it.

It seems years since the memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington when Billy Graham spoke from a Christian perspective about the danger facing our nation. Insofar as I know, nobody was talking about anthrax that day. We were just arriving at the realization of how heroic the New York City (and other) police officers and fire fighters are, and how much we should respect them. Nobody suspected that the U.S. Postal system would be used as a weapons delivery system, that mail handling would be a high-risk occupation.

The economic fallout has even reached the pumpkin patch. Our local newspaper reports that this year’s annual October Pumpkin Festival sponsored by a large farm west of Phoenix sold only half as many pumpkins as last year. The ripple effect has reached all the way from Wall Street out to our rural roadsides.

We’ve been made to realize how vulnerable we are as a nation, which translates into how vulnerable we are as individuals. It never occurred to us that such violence would ever intrude into our neighborhoods. We’ve known all along that wicked people blow up pizza restaurants in downtown Jerusalem, but that’s a long way from where we live. And we’ve never thought in terms of disease being sent through the mail.

This new-to-us environment has spread uncertainty and anxiety, certainly one of the terrorists’ goals. Various spokespersons are reviving FDR’s assurance that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but even so, knowing there are clandestine networks of warped minds set on destroying civilization as we define it is more than a little unsettling.

This is a time to realize that we expose ourselves to risk if we place our full confidence anywhere except in God alone. Psalm 118:9 suddenly seems very relevant: “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.” Most of us feel good about what our government is doing to fight terrorism. We support our President. But in the final analysis our real refuge is in the Lord. Whether for the present stressful time, or for eternity, there’s no better place to be than in the hands of God, “our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1).