Martin Wickens

25 years ago I was sat in my dining room in Northern Ireland. I was renting a small terraced house on Oakley Street in North Belfast. I could afford a house on my own. Terrorism had a way of keeping house prices down.

I had been in Bible college for a short time, working at Tesco in Ballygomartin, and, in hindsight, life was relatively simple. I was working on my computer. I couldn’t afford a Pentium processor so I had a PC that ran with an Intel Celeron chip, probably had 32-64 MB of ram and a HDD that had maybe 10 or 20 GB. It probably ran Windows 98, or I had perhaps made the bad choice at the time to move to Windows ME. Again, life was simple, even with terrible operating systems.

Livestreaming was in its early days. The little videos were small and grainy. I had the news playing while I chatted with a friend on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). Technology was exciting, growing and changing all the time, real advances were being made, and few of the downsides had yet developed. Most people still used “password” for their password and if pressured would change it to “password1” or “password1!”. Life was simple.

There were conflicts, there were corrupt politicians, there were Hollywood scandals, people were still people, sinners still sinned. There is the danger of looking back with rose tinted glasses, but I still come back to the refrain that life was simpler then.

As I chatted with my friend on AIM suddenly a breaking news graphic caught my eye. A plane had flown into one of the world trade towers. It had happened just moments before. For a few minutes my friend and I chatted about what a terrible accident it was.

Then the second plane hit. We both sensed something more was happening. We turned off the chat and turned to our TV’s.

Another plane hit the Pentagon. Another crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, presumed to have been heading for the nation’s capitol building or the White House.

America quickly came to a stand still. Much of the world did as well. Airspace was shut down. I didn’t know it at the time, but my pastor and his wife were on a plane heading to NYC from London and were diverted to Canada, like so many others. No one was told what was happening, partly out of security but partly because no one knew what was happening. For several days friendly locals provided a place to stay for my pastor and his wife.

When the world began to move again, everything had changed and in some ways has never gone back. I think not just in my perception, but in reality, life has never as simple as it was before.

I don’t know that I’ve written out my memories of that day. But 25 years on I wanted to put something down as well share something troubling.

These days I live just about 30 minutes from the site where Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania. It’s been a sobering privilege to visit the Flight 93 Memorial several times.

What troubles me is that, for many reasons, many have lost sight of who the enemy is. The US is divided. I know US history, I know disagreements and divisions have always been there, but there has always been something that united the different sides. Most, for much of the time, could agree on the need to stick together, if only to fight back against outside aggressors. Now, a significant number have been convinced that the US is not a special or unique nation. In fact, a loud minority, are convinced that the US is the enemy and even deserved to be attacked.

One of the ways in which life is not as simple as it used to be is the determination some have to call good evil and evil good. They try to make bad guys seem like victims, only doing bad things because they’re oppressed. The ones once believed to be good, they say are actually bad.

All that results is confusion, division, and weakness. This is not a bug, but a feature of the Marxist/Extreme Leftist ideology.

I cannot deny that things were never perfect, but I also believe things were better. I cannot deny that our government has made mistakes, but I also believe that the foundation of our nation, it’s DNA, is good.

I am convinced that the Great Awakening made an impact on the nation spiritually that fed directly into it’s founding documents and first citizens.

My hope is not in the political, but in the Christian principles that influenced the political. My hope is that there would be another awakening among the lost and a revival among Christians.

We can never go back to the way the world was before 9/11, but we need to get back to some of the principles that have been lost.