August 6, 2024 - Good Morning! It's Tuesday, August 6.
On a summer's day in 1927, a mother brought her young son to a county fair. The boy's name was Paul, and he had an obsession with airplanes. His mom had heard that there would be a pilot at the fair, a "barnstormer" as they were called then, who, for a fee of one dollar, would take you for a ride in his biplane. A dollar was a lot of money to this young mother, but she thought it was well worth it to give her son this experience. It was an experience that would go on to change the boy's life, as he would one day change the history of the world.
Ten years later, Paul joined the army and trained in San Antonio to become a pilot. Eight years after that he was chosen to pilot a B29 Superfortress for a top-secret mission. He christened the airplane, "Enola Gay", after his mother. And on August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets was at the controls when his aircraft dropped a bomb, a new kind of bomb, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In a single moment, 70,000 people were killed. By the end of the year, that number had more than doubled due to radiation poisoning. The Atomic Age had begun.
The United States, 79 years later, remains the only country in the world to ever employ nuclear weapons. But we are not alone in the capability. Seven other countries - Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have atomic bombs as well. And there is a ninth, unspoken member of this club . . . Israel. And these bombs - there are over 12,000 of them today - are many times more powerful than the one dropped by the Enola Gay.
We live in a time of "wars and rumors of wars". Just look at the list of countries in that last paragraph and consider all the conflicts that they are constantly involved in. But periods of aggression and abuse are not new to human history. Only the weapons change. The Apostle Paul lived and worked and wrote in the First Century, a time of constant conflict. We can hear a bit of that, I think, in these words that he wrote two thousand years ago to the Church in Rome.
"If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone". Romans 12:18
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
