OKC

Today's date, April 19, has a special place in our national psyche, not unlike 9/11 or December 7. Fifteen years ago today I was on a business trip in Alabama and turned on the hotel TV to catch the morning news. I was shocked, brokenhearted, angered, frightened by the horrific images being broadcasted from the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Babes in arms, bleeding, carried by rescue workers. Panic. Smoke and ash. Sirens.

That was the day, we soon learned, that terrorism from within our own society erupted. We did not know that it could or would, but it did. We have not been quite the same since.

At that time I was working with a small new congregation in an Oklahoma City suburb. They had previously adopted the Christian chorus, "People Need the Lord," as their theme song. Now, suddenly, the truth of that phrase was more apparent than ever. It occurred to me in the weeks that followed that it's very likely that Timothy McVeigh had sat in someone's Sunday school class when he was growing up. But for some reason, in his case the gospel just didn't "take." His personal alienation and misguided loyalties led him and his co-conspirators down to the cellars of human experience.

In my lifetime there have been days that rank with April 19 for tragedy: the Columbine and other school massacres, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Robert Kennedy, September 11,2001... All these dark days have reminded me that people do, indeed, need the Lord.