When I-V staff worker Jesse North got a haircut last November, he began talking to his barber about the events of September 11. Jesse works with students at Bucknell University (PA) and was commenting on how students had been very shaken at first, asking hard questions and worried about the prospects of war. Yet, within a few months, it was hard to read the mood on campus. His barber, Joe, asked, “Have you noticed that students just don’t want to talk about it?”

Maybe you’re noticing the same thing as Joe the barber. Yet because of the ongoing and uncertain nature of our national crisis, we offer three responses to encourage you to live confidently in the Lord in a very broken, ever-changing, and painful world.

ANTIDOTE FOR TERROR

By Gary Nielsen

Until September 11 it was common for New Yorkers—especially when in the “canyons” of the financial district—to look up and find the World Trade Center towers when they needed to get their bearings. The towers were their reference point. Now this reference point has been demolished and the loss clearly means much more than the mere absence of a physical landmark.

The writer of Psalm 121 begins, “I lift my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” (just as someone in New York could have said, “I lift my eyes to the WTC towers”). The Psalmist seems to catch himself looking to the size and stability of the hills for his help, then asks himself, “Wait a minute! Why am I looking to these hills? Are they the source of my help? Indeed not, for my help comes from the Lord, Yahweh, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

As an American who fears the living God, I have been asking myself, What am I lifting my eyes up to? Where am I looking for my help? What is my reference point? It is so easy to depend on things in this world, things that have no certainty, things that are not worthy of my trust.

When the anthrax scare began, my fear surged as I contemplated what might be ahead for us: a world where anarchy reigns when terrorists relentlessly pursue their horrible objectives. As I struggled with fear that came close to terror, I sensed that I just needed to be honest about my feelings. When I faced the truth and confessed to God that I was not trusting in him, I found deliverance. Once again I learned that God responds to simple faith and honesty before him by pouring out the grace that is sufficient for whatever adversity may come our way.

As frightening as it may be at times, my hope is that through these terrible events we may continue to test what we are depending on and what we are hanging on to that is keeping us from a deeper relationship with God.

And, if God is indeed speaking to someone, let’s not assume it is someone “out there” who needs a wake-up call. As believers, our biggest problems are not “out there” but in our hearts, where materialism and other sins have a stronghold which keep us at a distance from God and are barriers to God’s desire to bless the nations.

These times are full of extraordinary opportunities to bear witness to the Maker of heaven and earth, the Lord who helps us. May we faithfully seize this opportunity!

—Gary Nielsen is on staff with InterVarsity in Columbus, Ohio, serving as an associate area director. Gary and his wife, Peggy, have seven children. Gary loves to travel; at last count he’s been to about 30 countries.

A COMMUNITY OF TRANSFORMATION

By Tom Allen

Since September 11, we have seen a lot of prayer in our UC–Riverside community and in our world. I have wondered more than once, “When people pray to God, what do they think he is like?” People have different ideas of God, and many have no idea. Billy Graham said at the national prayer service in Washington that now is a time for people in this country to renew their faith in God. Where will people turn to do that?

I think people will turn to churches that are being the true Church, a community where people are honest and real about their lives. A community where a “disposition to transformation” exists among people, where their lives and character actually do change for the better. A community where people experience the life-changing grace and truth of God in Christ, a community where they are born again into a new life and experience being God’s beloved. People will turn to a church that receives them just as they are and shows them that with Jesus, they can have the life they have always wanted and were created for.

It is always a good time for us be building community centered around Jesus and the reality of our common sinfulness and common forgiveness. But perhaps today there is no better time to be building the community of God. Will you give yourself to constructing this type of community? If you do, it will be for your own good. And if you do, it will be so that those who have turned towards God in recent days may look at our community and say, “Ah, there he is . . . God is there in the midst of them.”

—Tom Allen has been on staff with InterVarsity for 14 years. He lives in Riverside, California, with his wife, Denise, and two sons.

THE LIBERATING TRUTH

by Mark Potter

After the morning of that singular Tuesday, I sat down with my family at lunch to talk about what had happened. To everyone’s surprise, five-year-old Emilie began the discussion. With furrowed brow and shaking fist she declared, “What they did was evil!” We all agreed. But Eléna, who is eight, raised a troubling question. “Yes. It was evil, but the people who did it probably thought they were doing something good. So how can you ever tell?”

Eléna’s question is one of the agonies of the ages: How can anyone really know what is good and evil? Does no one know for sure? Are good and evil only relative to time and place—one culture’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter? How can one ever know the answer to these questions?

I explained to Eléna that God is the Creator. He made everything. And everything he made shouts out the facts about him, the One True God. So in one sense everyone knows who he is and what he is like.

On top of this, he has put into everyone a conscience. He has written his law on every human heart. Further still, he has written his whole law and plan and Good News for anyone to read in the Bible. And best of all, the Creator came as Jesus. He explained Truth, lived Truth—and is the Truth. So, follow Jesus. This is the only way anyone can ever really know what is good and evil.

This is what I said to Eléna. It is also what I said to many students. The short answer satisfied Eléna—for now. But for most students it raises a hundred more questions. At the bottom of them all, to use a metaphor, is Copernicus’s question about our solar system: Is the sun in orbit around the fixed earth, or is the earth in orbit around the fixed sun? That is, is God in orbit around us, or we in orbit around God? Is our standard what God is measured by, or is God’s standard what we are measured by?

Of course we as sinners presuppose the former. We are centered around ourselves. Therefore we presume to evaluate the God of the Bible to see if he measures up to our standards. No wonder we have competing definitions of good and evil roaring through our world. We have “become like God, knowing good and evil” for ourselves (Genesis 3). And on September 11 we all gasped at the deadly dangers of these competing definitions.

For decades, most campuses have tried to protect themselves from the very real dangers of competing ultimate beliefs by subtly establishing one set of beliefs as the approved set. Yet this unspoken establishment of one “religion” largely removes the ultimate questions from the public discourse on campus. At best, they become private matters; at worst, unimportant—for the ultimate questions are hardly worth asking when already officially answered.

Yet both bad habits—either privatizing or ignoring the ultimate questions and competing answers—make the college campus a boring place rather than an exciting world view compare-and-contrast project. Ironically, colleges become places to acquire data rather than to seek Truth. Therefore many learn only to manipulate this world and never pursue its meaning.

But the Bible describes a revolution! It begins at the beginning: God alone is God, the only fixed point, and humanity is in orbit around him. All things are God-centered. He made everything. He is the standard and starting point of Truth. He alone defines good and evil. He has answered all the ultimate questions. This thoroughgoing God-centeredness is revolutionary. It liberates persons, colleges, cultures and nations. Let’s work to engage non-Christians in the big questions, and equip Christians to understand, believe, articulate and live the Bible’s revolutionary, God-centered view of the world.

—Mark Potter directs GreenTree Campus Ministries at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. He is a former InterVarsity staff worker. Mark lives with his wife, Gwen, and their children in Ardmore, PA.