by Mike Payne
2016 is almost over and a new year is fast approaching. This year has seen some of the biggest changes to emerge on the scene in the U.S. since the late 1960s when men began to wear women’s hair styles, illegal drugs were groovy, and love the one you’re with was the mantra of the day. Then in 1973 came legalized abortion, and progressives waiting at the airport for our servicemen to return home from Vietnam just to spit on them. I grew up all throughout that period. I despised it then, and I despise it now. Even as a much younger man, I looked around and wondered, “Where has my country gone?”
We have been on such a steep moral decline that on November 7, 2016, sixty-six million Americans apparently also no longer recognized their own country and voted for drastic change. America had been through the rise of AIDS, with a clearly discernible cause, yet no one thought that what brought it on might have been unacceptable—if not to a God they didn’t believe in, then certainly to the primordial ooze which they claim to be the building blocks of the universe. America watched as the very moral compass with which God had endowed our creators to build this great nation was ushered out the door. Prayer was taken out of public schools (note the corresponding mass shootings which have occurred since) and marriage lost its meaning. We have watched our children, friends and loved ones die from cocaine, heroin and meth. And, over the last five decades, America has learned the meaning of genocide as we saw African nations murder their own people in cold blood by the millions, and Russia and Eastern Europe starve their citizens to death in an attempt to compete with the U.S. in what became known as the “cold war.” Today we’re barely fazed by the horrors we see from ISIS and in Syria. It’s a sad state of affairs when we can’t even discern who the bad guys are anymore.
Day by day, year by year, the very identity that created and defined America has been dissolving before our eyes. For many, it began to seem hopeless that we could regain our great American traditions, culture, and borders. And as we began to be more and more guided by these secular progressive views it wasn’t long before the cover of Time Magazine declared, “God is dead.” Fortunately, Time Magazine is dead; God is very much alive and well.
This slide began with Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” and has continued until today throughout a period when we were constantly told by progressives to “live and let live.”
Now we find ourselves at a precipice. America has done its part; it has elected the greatest change-maker to ever grace a Presidential podium, Donald J. Trump. Need proof? Trump beat all sixteen Republican candidates, the entire global media, world leaders, every left-leaning billionaire on the planet, and every Hollywood elite. Note to self: Something has happened and it was big!
President Trump has the capacity to offer a beacon of hope to the millions who supported him when “there was no path to victory” for him. We have an opportunity to return to common sense and our founding biblical principles after decades of craziness. But this is not a job we can do on our own—America must participate. The book upon which this nation was founded, the Holy Bible, says in 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people which are called by my name shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear them from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” That’s exactly what my family will do in 2017. What say you?
