82 years ago today, they were setting up for a worship service on the USS Arizona.
And then, it’s not an exaggeration to say quite literally everything in the world changed in an instant.

Most people, as we remember Pearl Harbor, will express thanks and gratitude to those willing to lay their lives down in service to our country, and I fully agree with that sentiment. Thank you to all our veterans this day! We also think about the horror that those in Pearl Harbor must've experienced that day, and we are left somber.
But I’m often left to wonder how this country survived such a brutal and unexpected attack. We should have been undone. If not for foundations that had already been set, who we were, what we stood for, what we could be prepared for, we likely would have been. Freedom, and standing for what is right regardless of what might come against.
Those were the foundations of who we were, who we still are supposed to be.
More than that, in that moment, we here in the US, who were separated entirely from so much of the world, were now fully engaged with the lives of people in Micronesia, in Singapore, in Ethiopia, in Romania, in Finland, just to name a few. Each of their worlds were vastly different from each other as well as our own, but now here we were, fighting in the same struggle.
In your life, things may be chaotic, stressful, peaceful, easy, broken, unwieldy, etc, but all of what’s going on could be upended in a second - death, injury, ending of a relationship, loss of job. How will you stand if (when) your world gets thrown into flux? Psalm 40 tells us that people who wait patiently on God every day will have a “firm place to stand” because they “trust in the Lord.” Colossians 3:3 tells us that if we have trusted in Him, our confidence comes from having our lives “hidden with Christ in God.” And it doesn’t matter where you are - your life is almost certainly experiencing far different things currently than mine is. But the Sovereign and Gracious God, the Alpha and the Omega, who holds all things in His hands, is the One who can sustain each one of us.
So on this 82nd anniversary of the attacks at Pearl Harbor, let’s complete what they were setting up to do on the Arizona that morning, let’s join our hearts together in worship of the God who is worthy of our praise. And if (when) your world falls apart today, have your feet already planted and your life already hidden in the One who will never leave you or forsake you. And put your trust, your whole life, in Him today.
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