Neither confidence, nor despair, but… God.

In these trying times, I thought it might be an encouragment to hear a voice from the past.  Writing about the crises facing the earth in post-World War II-era, Frank Laubach called the world to prayer and action to pursue peace.  Hear some of his words from his 1946 publication, “Prayer in an Atomic Age”.  You may note not only how much times have changed but also how much they have stayed the same… 

“Today few educated men doubt the power of prayer.  Millions of people, however, are haunted with a guilty sense that while we have pursued scientific inquiry in other directions with enormous results, we have failed to investigate and use the mighty energies which prayer can release.  Especially in this the most crucial hour in all history, when we need to employ every resource there is, we are afraid that we have overlooked the greatest resource of all.    We had better not neglect prayer now!  As Cordell Hull solemnly warned us, “the human race is confronted with the gravest crisis in its experience.  We who are on the scene of action have to say which way it is going.”  We are, in fact, in a terrifying dilemma.  Science has been developing robots (missiles?) which travel 3500 miles an hour, and super-explosives so diabolically efficient in wholesale killings that all scientists agree with Anthony Eden and General Eisenhower that “we cannot survive a third world war.”  But we have never yet had permanent peace.  That is our dilemma.  We must now find and follow some straight and narrow path never before trodden.  If we do not find it, we shall perish.    The way to peace is an untrodden path, but it is not unknown.  It is the way Jesus gave us.  “Love they neighbor as thyself,” not in word but in deed.  Let all men spend their lives, as Jesus did, helping others.  Let strong men sacrifice their personal advantage so that all may have equal opportunities.    Jesus’ way would be peace itself if we followed it.  But men don’t want to change as radically as that!  They are still trying to make selfish greed work.  In the peace negotiations, nations have jostled for special privilege, and selfish business interests have tried to grab advantages that would be sure to make other men hate them.  Senator Vandenberg wrote before the San Francisco Conference that nations were striving for “America first”, “England first”, “Russia first”—the very attitude which has caused all wars.  Peace cannot be permanent until we put the “whole world first.”  No part of the world, whether America or England or Russia, or any business enterprise, is as important as the welfare of all.  “Thy kingdom come on earth”, is not only Christian, it is the only possible roadway to lasting peace.  We are still in the heat of a crucial battle between the way of Jesus and the way of greed.  The Allies have cut a cancer out of Italy, Germany, and Japan; but the cancer still poisons the blood stream off the world, and will break out again and kill us unless we get the cancer tissue out of our system.  Nobody but God can cleanse our blood stream, and even God can remove it only if He has full gangway.  We must pray for God’s miracle or perish.  For if we refuse to yield to God, His only recourse is to sweep us off the earth and start over.  So this is not a time for confidence, nor is it a time for despair; it is the time to turn to God.  It is the time for humility, penitence, desperate resolve, rectitude, obedience to the will of God all-out sincerity!   

Everybody is important now, all of us, young and old alike, whether in public life or in private.  The future of the world depends upon whether you and enough others like you pray widely enough and often enough.”