Nine Eleven
Today is September 11. It is an ominous date in our calendar and is often referred to as 9/11. I imagine many of you who are reading this can remember where you were on the eleventh of September 2001 when you heard the news that two aeroplanes had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
Soon after we received this news, a third aeroplane crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, and then a fourth aeroplane crash-landed into a field in Pennsylvania.
These four coordinated terrorist attacks were carried out against the United States by al-Qaeda. They were the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history and resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. That day will forever be remembered as 9/11.
The terrorists who orchestrated these horrific attacks must have spent a great deal of time planning them. So when I think of 9/11 and of other atrocities where people have deliberately planned to commit mayhem, my mind goes to the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. It is called the Lord’s Prayer.
In this prayer we make four direct requests to God. We pray that he will give us our daily bread; forgive us our sins; and lead us not into temptation. Then, in the fourth request we ask God to “deliver us from evil”.
And it is this fourth request that I am drawn to when I think of 9/11 and of people today who might be planning evil schemes. I believe that those who planned and executed the events of 9/11 were motivated by the power of evil.
So I suggest that every day we should pray the Lord’s Prayer because it includes the plea to God: “Deliver us from evil”. If we don’t pray the whole prayer of sixty-three words, we could just pray those four words: “Deliver us from evil”.
So on this 9/11 day, I will be praying for every one of you who reads this column. By now you will have worked out what my prayer for you will be. It will be: “May God deliver you from evil.”