Responding to last weekend’s terrorists’ attempts in London and attack in Glasgow, syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer has suggested that the stories are getting greater play in the U.S. than in Europe.  He reasons that because Europeans have been living with bombings since the world wars, they aren’t as easily panicked over the recent spate of terrorist attacks.  Perhaps he’s right.  Though how any society could accept “an occasional terrorist attack” as “one of the costs of doing business in the modern world” is beyond me.

Maybe what we’re witnessing is the frog in the kettle reality—the gradual ramping up of the burner, eventually boiling the hapless frog by stealth.  Who can say?

Of this much I am deeply convicted.  The global season of prayer that culminates today on 07-07-07 has been neither inconsequential nor unnecessary.  For at what time in our collective memory have this nation and the nations of earth been more distracted and politically distraught over our inability to solve a mounting host of global dilemmas and predicaments?  Terrorism, global warming, immigration, AIDS, pollution, water scarcity, petroleum depletion, abortion, the growing chasm between the have’s and the have-not’s, famine, drought, nuclear proliferation, the collapse of morals—you could probably double the list easily.

The point?  “The present is a time of overwhelming interest to all living.  Rulers and statesmen, men [and women] who occupy positions of trust and authority, thinking men and women of all classes, have their attention fixed upon the events taking place about us. . . . They observe the intensity that is taking possession of every earthly element, and they recognize that something great and decisive is about to take place—that the world is on the verge of a stupendous crisis” (Education 179, 180).

This isn’t rocket science.  Instead, today’s blog is an earnest appeal to you to keep on praying.  These past seven days have been good for my own soul, as Karen and I have reread and claimed the many Bible promises of the Holy Spirit’s outpouring.  Shall we stop praying now?  We must not!  Can you recall a more needy hour of history we’ve lived through together?  If ever the church (and the world) desperately needed the rain showers of the Holy Spirit to revive our parched souls, to refresh our brittle hopes, to reinvigorate our mission to the world, isn’t it now?

Paul didn’t quit praying.  From his Roman prison he wrote to his friends in Philippi:  “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy” (Philippians 1:3, 4, emphasis supplied).  Because there are some prayers that you never stop praying.  And the prayer to be filled with the Holy Spirit is just such a petition.  And why not?  After all, “with the reception of this gift, all other gifts would be ours” (ML 57, emphasis supplied).

So together let’s keep on keeping on with that prayer.  And if you’d like to add a variation to it, would you pray it for your pastors?  On July 13 we begin a city-wide evangelistic campaign in La Ceiba, Honduras.  At the same time Pastor Tim begins a crusade in Mississippi.  And our souls will be energized, knowing you’re claiming Ephesians 6:19, 20 on our behalf.  La Ceiba, Mississippi and Michigan—three of the needy places on earth for God’s global rain.  Please pray on!