Remember the puzzles we played as children where you connect the dots to reveal a picture of an object or a person? I have been thinking recently about this game and applying it to our current world. There is a new image appearing. Can we see it? Do we see it, but pretend it is not happening?

The Western world will not always be as it is in the present. Events are taking place before our eyes that will change the way of life we have taken for granted for so long. This month marks the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A newly published book called Why America Slept (by Gerald Posner) details the missed opportunities America had to forestall such an attack. Missed opportunities litter the landscape, providing convincing information that had preventive steps, based on credible evidence, been taken in the decade before the attack, thousands of people would not have lost their lives. Many experts continue to say that another major attack is coming upon a major Western nation. Many also ask, Is enough being done to prevent such a blow? Are we truly prepared at the personal level?

Two years after 9/11 we continue to drift. I see it in the way major news companies focus and shape American views. It is easy to slip back into the sensational and salacious news items. Alleged sex scandals of basketball stars are covered extensively and lead the news for weeks. Murder cases, political recalls and vain and petty campaign efforts by grasping politicians dominate serious discussion. No one wants to ask the hard questions of the moment, the questions that could lead us to an effective national renewal.

With two recent court decisions, we see our nation taking the form of a broken vessel that cannot hold anything of moral value. Removing the state laws forbidding sodomy and ordering the removal of a public display of the Ten Commandments from a judicial building are omens of darker clouds on the horizon. These are two among many other signs that indicate the American way of life is changing. The United States is going through a benchmark change that, unless halted and reversed, will transform this country Americans love. We cannot see that the freedoms we cherish draw their basis from the spiritual laws outlined in the simple yet profound document known as the Ten Commandments. Like so many other nations in history, we do not like to retain God in our knowledge.

God said through Jeremiah, "For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13). We are gradually leaking the essence of our life when we turn our backs on any vestige of moral heritage rooted in the law of God. Unless we go through a national repentance unlike any in our history, we are going the way of every nation, great or small, that has cast aside the restraints that are outlined in God's great spiritual law.

Go ahead, be honest, really honest. Connect the dots of our present world. See the developing picture of a world and age that is coming to a close. There is still time to turn and live righteously in this present evil world. Discern the times, make the right choices and build the right kind of enduring relationship with your Creator. We are moving closer to the time when Christ will intervene to restore justice and righteousness within a new world. —WNP