Ramadan and the summer of discontent

In Syria, Muslims seeking to pray in some cities are dodging shells lobbed at their mosques by the military.

In other Muslim-majority nations swept by recent political change, the hopes raised by the “Arab Spring” are sagging in this summer of doubt and fear about what will happen next as factions struggle for power. “Now Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia are all [attempting] similar transitions — at once — but without a neutral arbiter to referee,” observes Thomas Friedman. “It is unprecedented in this region, and we can already see just how hard this will be. … [T]he new dawn will take time to appear.”

In Somalia and its neighbors, meanwhile, masses of Somali Muslim refugees are unwillingly observing a grim Ramadan fast: famine-induced starvation.

Ramadan, the annual month of dawn-to-dusk fasting observed throughout the Muslim world, began Aug. 1. This year, it found millions of Muslims struggling for political freedom, for a better future — or for basic survival.

But Ramadan itself calls Muslims to higher things, things beyond this material world. “Ramadan helps us become conscious of our souls,” explains one Muslim. “Fasting helps us to separate ourselves temporarily from our worldly needs and pursuits so as to become aware of higher needs and pursuits.”

So why should Christians care about a Muslim observance? Because Ramadan is a priceless opportunity to lift Muslims in prayer to God — and to love them in action by His grace — whether they live across the globe or right next door.

The month of fasting isn’t easy, even for Muslims who don’t face political turmoil or life-threatening hunger.

“It is a time when Muslims try to spend more time focusing on [Allah] and learning about patience and humility,” says a Christian worker in South Asia. “We have seen the opposite effect as the month wears on for the millions around us. There are often fights in the traffic jams as people’s patience is frazzled by lack of food and water. There is also the feeling by many that they just are unable to keep the fast and are therefore unable to please [Allah]. Pray that Muslims … will realize their deep need for a Savior. Pray that they will experience the grace and love of God that will forever replace the rules and works of man.”

Make no mistake: Many Muslims eagerly want to know more about Jesus.

A college student from my church has spent the summer ministering to Iraqi Muslim refugees in the Atlanta area. In the course of providing practical help, she’s had many opportunities to share stories from the Bible about Jesus and His Lordship. Nearly everyone listens; several have decided to follow Jesus as Lord.

One 22-year-old Muslim “jumped into this spiritual discussion with us the first time we met him,” my college friend related. “I told him the story about when Jesus calmed the storm. He listened very quietly and was very curious. Once I was done, he said something we’ve kept in our minds: ‘Why do Christians only tell other Christians about Jesus? They should teach the followers of Islam these things, because the Christians already know.’”

Good question. Whether believers assist Him or not, however, God is moving among Muslims.

In Washington, D.C., a group of Christians regularly visits shopping malls to share the Gospel with Muslims. Yet after years of ministry, they “have yet to find a church, of any denomination, who will partner with them,” says a long-time worker among Arab Muslim peoples. “Without a doubt, there have been more people incited to pray, and they are praying. The net result is that, in the absence of Christian obedience to go and make disciples, God is still working and calling Arab Muslims to follow Him in greater numbers than at any other time in history.”

He speaks through His followers when they are faithful to lift Him up. He speaks through His Word. And He speaks through dreams and visions, as countless testimonies from throughout the Muslim world continue to confirm. Here is an account of one such dream from a Kashmiri Muslim woman in India who now follows Christ:

“I was in a beautiful garden, and an old woman dressed in white came up to me and said, ‘Come with me.’ She then took me to a place where I saw Him … Jesus … dressed in white and glowing with love for me. He hugged me and took me in His arms. He set a crimson rose in my lap and then said to me, ‘You are my daughter.’ And all I could do was cry. Then I turned around and saw a huge crowd of hundreds, thousands, all coming to be baptized.”

During the closing days of Ramadan, and particularly on the “Night of Power,” (Aug. 26 this year), many spiritually hungry Muslims will stay up all night, seeking divine forgiveness and praying for a vision. Ask God to answer their prayer with a vision of Jesus, the “man in white” so many other Muslim seekers have encountered. Pray that they will hear His unmistakable voice calling them to Himself — and that they, too, will follow Him.

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/136/13637/13637-76625.mp3

For videos, stories and other resources exploring how to love and pray for Muslims, visit http://www.lovingmuslims.com/

Churches as generational mission labs

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/135/13592/13592-76399.mp3

You’re just entering your prime, baby.

You’re not older; you’re better. You hit the gym with a vengeance. Aches and pains? If you’ve got ’em, you’re not admitting it to yourself or anyone else. You’ve got big plans for the future. Sixty is the new 40. “Retirement” is not part of your vocabulary (you probably won’t be able to afford it, anyway).

You’re a boomer, of course. You and your generational comrades have been turning the world upside down since you were pimply teens. So you’re not going to let little things like age, gravity or mortality slow you down.

Of five emerging trends in American churches cited by LifeWay Christian Resources President Thom Rainer in the Summer 2011 issue of Facts and Trends (http://www.lifeway.com/Article/Perspective-major-trends-churches-in-america), this one struck me:

“Senior adult ministries in churches will experience steep declines.”

Wait a minute. The U.S. population is aging, right? Senior adult ministry ought to be a growth industry. To the contrary: Boomers don’t do “senior.”

“As the large baby boomer generation moves into their older years, they will resist any suggestion that they are senior adults, no matter how senior they may be,” Rainer explains. “Unfortunately, many churches are slow to adapt to new realities. If they do senior adult ministry the way they’ve always done it, it will be headed for failure.”

It makes perfect sense if you understand the boomer psyche. As a generation, we are deep in denial about aging. In our minds, we’re still hip, young and wrinkle-free. And to be fair, medical science has added quite a few years to our potential life spans. In many cases, we really do have more energy and vitality than our parents had when they hit 50 or 60. So we don’t need no stinkin’ shuffleboard. We’re just getting started.

In a recent column I quoted New York Times writer David Brooks, who lamented that so many young college grads are being “sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. … [They] are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.”

It sounds good, but encourages boomeristic self-involvement at the expense of service to others — and to God. Here’s a thought: Instead of passing on our worst trait, what if we boomers reinvented “senior adult ministry” in the years to come? Rather than waiting for churches to minister to us, what if we turned them into laboratories where boomers mentor our successors, the Millennials, to reach our communities and the nations with the love of Christ?

Another trend Rainer highlights: “Our nation will see the emergence of the largest generational mission field in more than a century. According to our current research, the Millennial generation, those born between 1980 and 2000, will have a very low Christian representation. Our estimates now are that only 15 percent are Christian. With a huge population of nearly 80 million, that means that nearly 70 million young people are not Christians. … They are not angry at churches and Christians. They simply ignore us because they do not deem us as meaningful or relevant.”

In this sea of spiritual lostness, churches are floundering to stay afloat.

“The facts are, evangelical Christianity, not to mention mainline Christianity, is declining in America,” Rainer commented in a Baptist Press story earlier this year. “Why? One of the primary reasons is the church — many local churches, I should say — have become more about what we can do for our members than what we can do to reach out beyond.”

But Christian Millennials are asking, “What can we do to become incarnational in our communities? What can we do to reach the nations?”

Christian boomers, who have actively participated in the historic expansion of the Gospel across the globe in the last generation, can help them answer those questions. As a group, Millennials respect their parents and other elders and value relationships with them. That goes double for Millennials in the church — if churches make the effort to nurture that influence.

“They have learned from older people all their lives, and they don’t want to stop now,” Rainer writes. “They want to be led and taught in their places of work, in their churches and in their families. They particularly want to learn from couples who have had long and successful marriages. Many Millennials see such examples as heroes to emulate.”

That’s right, boomers. We can be mentors, even heroes, to Millennials who are searching for godly models of missional servanthood. I can’t think of a better way to defy aging.

It sure beats denial.

Strategy for victory: failure

Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic won 43 straight matches over a period of six months before losing to Roger Federer in the French Open in June.

This amazing series of wins, against the best players in the world, rocked the sport of tennis. But it was the loss, and a string of bitter defeats last year during a self-described personal “crisis,” that set the stage for Djokovic’s greatest triumph to date: his first Wimbledon championship. He beat defending champion Rafael Nadal July 3 in convincing style on the sport’s biggest stage.

“[L]osing that really epic semifinal against Federer — a great match — I managed to recover and to come back … and to win Wimbledon for the first time in my life,” Djokovic told reporters.

Winning is great, but losing helps you get better — if you learn from your mistakes. Any good athlete or coach will tell you the same. Compete with bigger, faster, better players, they advise. Pay the price of losing repeatedly in order to gain the skills to win.

Wise parents and teachers instill the same approach to life in children. “Helicopter parents” who anxiously hover, terrified their kids will stub their toes or not get into the school play, are only ensuring greater failure down the road. If you don’t fail once in a while, you don’t grow. And you fear taking on something really challenging.

Churches, ministry organizations and mission teams often make the same mistake. They stick to the script, the proven program, the best practice. But some brave soul has to discover for the first time what works, usually by repeated failures.

Pastor/author Rick Warren reminds leaders at his church “that they have my permission to make at least one mistake a week,” he wrote in a 2004 Baptist Press column. “I don’t want [them] to fall into sloppy habits, but I do want them to feel free to fail because that means they’ll also feel free to take risks! My point is that if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re probably not trying anything new. And if you’re not trying anything new, then you’re not learning, and if you’re not learning, then you and your ministry will quickly be out of date, perhaps even irrelevant. The secret to being innovative is not being afraid to fail.”

It’s also the secret of faith, Warren added. The unprofitable servant in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-29) was also the unfaithful one. He took no risks with the money his master gave him. Peter, on the other hand, recklessly stepped out of the boat to walk toward Jesus on the stormy sea (Matthew 14:22-31). He began to fail, to sink. His faith was small. But it was greater than that of the other terrified disciples huddling in the boat.

Every business and management book published in the last 25 years probably has a chapter titled “Freedom to fail” or something similar. It sounded great — until the U.S. economy failed spectacularly in 2008 because of foolish risks taken in Washington and on Wall Street. Now investors fear spending their money on new ventures. Businesses hesitate to hire new workers. The economy will never truly recover, however, until people in a position to change things risk failure and show some faith in the future.

“At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix,” observed business writer Megan McArdle in a recent article for TIME magazine (“In Defense of Failure”).

“That’s a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have,” McArdle wrote. “The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. … The real secret of our success is that we learn from the past, and then we forget it. Unfortunately, we’re dangerously close to forgetting the most important lessons of our own history: how to fail gracefully and how to get back on our feet with equal grace.”

Too many organizations, however, insist on punishing failure.

“I once taught a workshop in a large organization and included an activity where I asked the delegates to think of the ‘second right answer’ to a problem,” says Mark McGuinness, who coaches organizational creativity. “They looked like rabbits caught in the headlights. When I asked them what was wrong, they told me they were always expected to come up with the right answer and were severely punished for making mistakes. No prizes for guessing how creative they were. And yet — when they relaxed a little — they showed me they were perfectly capable of thinking creatively. It was the fear of punishment that stopped them from using this ability at work.

“People and companies that succeed through innovation take a very different approach to failure. They accept it, or even encourage it, because they know that failure holds the key to success. … Encourage people to try new things and learn from their inevitable mistakes. Reward them for being open and honest about mistakes and failures — so that these are not swept under the carpet, causing even more problems. If you’re going to punish anything, punish failure to learn. If you don’t, the market will.”

Are you listening, ministry leaders? Disciple makers model how to follow the Lord, just as Christ did with the Twelve. He sent them out two by two, let them learn the hard way (see Peter and the boat) and patiently taught them day by day. I’ve lost count of the number of Christian leaders I’ve seen sabotage their own ministries by refusing to allow their followers to grow through failure.

If you want hundreds of examples of victory coming through failure, defeat, loss and despair, read the Bible. The ultimate “failure” of all time was the shameful death of Jesus at the hands of those who misunderstood and rejected Him.

It resulted in eternal victory over death itself.

Cold welcome for international students

Listen to an audio version of this post: http://media1.imbresources.org/files/134/13419/13419-75278.mp3

A foreign student preparing to return home after several years at an American university left behind a full suitcase with his roommate.

“What’s this?” the roommate asked.

“It’s full of the gifts I brought to give Americans when they invited me to their homes,” the student replied, a tinge of sadness in his voice. “No one invited me.”

The student, incidentally, was from Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps you’ve heard similar stories. The cold “welcome” frequently shown to foreign students who come to America isn’t exactly news — except to the bewildered students themselves, who struggle with isolation and loneliness far from home. Many of them come from families and cultures where hospitality to visitors is prized and the opposite is considered shameful — families more similar, when you think about it, to the ones we read about in the Bible than the hyper-private collections of individuals we exalt these days. Foreign students don’t understand that many Americans no longer open their homes to their next-door neighbors, much less strangers.

“Most of our people who study in the U.S. are amazed they can live there for four or five years and never enter an American home, much less a believing one,” says a mission worker serving in North Africa and the Middle East. “Why is it that God delivers the lost Muslim to our doorstep, and we treat them as if they are not there?”

I suspect a more sinister force than suspicion, fear or prejudice is at work: apathy. Too often, we don’t know they are among us. If we do know, we don’t care.

“We spend a lot of time reaching out to the rich, the famous, the cool, the successful, the powerful, the influential, the ones with the right style of glasses,” observes mission strategist Justin Long. “I could be wrong, but it seems to me Jesus didn’t spend a whole lot of time with people who rejected Him. He didn’t spend years trying to persuade them. So why is it we spend years trying to persuade the stubbornly, rebelliously atheistic cousin (or nephew or uncle or whatever) and never reach out to the foreign exchange student?”

Long asks another, related question: “Why is it that so many Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists (85 percent, to be somewhat precise) do not have a personal relationship with a Christian? … Somehow I doubt it is the fault of most of those Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.”

Don’t stop telling your cousin and your uncle about Christ. Maybe one day they’ll listen. But take a look around and notice some of the strangers in your midst.

More than 671,000 international students were enrolled in American colleges and universities during the 2008-2009 academic year, according to a report funded by the U.S. Department of State. The leading nations of origin: India (83,833 students), China (67,723) and South Korea (62,392). China and India account for more than 45 percent of all foreign students enrolled in American graduate schools. Other top 20 student senders include Saudi Arabia, Nepal and Vietnam.

“Thanks to a push by their government to make secondary education universal, more Chinese students are seeking college degrees, but there are not enough (Chinese) colleges, and too few high-quality institutions, to meet the need,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. “A decline in the value of the dollar has put an American education in reach of middle-class Chinese families — who probably had already been salting away much of their disposable income to pay for education.”

One top Chinese student interviewed by the Chronicle was so eager to study at an American liberal arts college that she applied to 28 of them before enrolling in an elite institution. “They really value education and develop you to be a full person,” she said. “They give you a lot of attention.”

I wonder if this young woman, who is likely to become a leader and influencer when she gets home to China, is getting any attention from Christians in the community where she attends school. It would be a tragedy if she, too, leaves behind a suitcase of unopened gifts.

Rejecting the cult of self

Our daughter graduated from high school a few weeks ago, marching down the aisle with her classmates to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance as we parents swelled with pride.

Then we had to listen to the obligatory commencement address.

As commencement speakers go, our guy wasn’t bad. A local radio talk show host, he was humorous and engaging. He delivered a speech that was part pep talk, part political diatribe. The pep was fine, the politics unnecessary considering the occasion. To his credit, he admitted that he didn’t remember a single word uttered at his own high school graduation many years ago (I could relate to that). He assured the assembled grads they would forget his words, too.

It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was the Gettysburg Address compared to the typical commencement speech — particularly the ones heard these days at major universities. Often delivered by media types or celebrities, such speeches usually consist of clichés, platitudes and outright insults to the young minds and hearts they’re supposed to inspire.

“Worst of all, [students] are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears,” writes New York Times columnist and social critic David Brooks. “[M]any graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

“But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.”

Misleads how? For one thing, it promotes absurdly unrealistic expectations among graduates entering today’s tough job market. On a deeper level, however, it glorifies the self-worship that has come to define so much of American life. Too many boomers have yet to notice the destruction this mindset has wrought on our culture, so we pass the all-consuming idol of self on to the generation now coming into its own. We tell our children, “It’s all about you, kid. You’re the god of your little world, which you create and which exists only to make you happy. Go forth and fulfill yourself!”

This is a perversion of the American ideal of liberty, which certainly includes individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but not to the exclusion of shared responsibility and voluntary, possibly sacrificial service to others.

“The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and a calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy,” Brooks observes. “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. … Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.”

Sound familiar? It should; it’s a secular echo of the words of Jesus Christ: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:24, 25, NASB).

Following Christ is the antithesis of the pagan cult of self. Indeed, He demands the ruthless, daily execution of self. The Apostle Paul describes such a life:

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant …” — to the point of death upon a cross (Philippians 2:3-7, NASB).

Personal fulfillment — happiness, if you will, though joy is a better word — comes in the daily act of loving and serving Jesus and others. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647 summarized it.

That once was the guiding principle of the education offered by great Western universities. Now it seems to be: “Man’s chief end is to glorify himself, and to party forever.” Nothing new in that; the prophet Isaiah heard people shouting, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die” seven centuries before Christ. It was an ancient philosophy even then.

But young people in search of a worthy calling want more. They’re rejecting the cult of self, even if their parents still buy into it. They want to give their lives to something greater than themselves.

There is no greater calling than the mission of God — that every people, tribe and nation will know and worship Him. See what it looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=g_8lcnHdWL4

Holding their breath in Egypt

Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/130/13050/13050-73592.mp3

For Sabri,* the daily lurch between excitement and fear has settled into queasy uncertainty about Egypt’s future — and what it holds for followers of Christ.

Sabri, a white-collar worker who lives with his family in Cairo, is an evangelical Christian. When massive demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other cities sparked national demands for freedom in January, he joined many other Egyptians in hoping positive change might be coming after decades of stagnation and dictatorship.

As a member of Egypt’s embattled Christian minority, he also wondered how Islamic extremists would react to the situation.

Hope and concern, however, took a temporary back seat to terror as chaos spread. Longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak first tried to hang on to power, then lost his grip amid bloody clashes on the streets — and behind-the-scenes maneuvering among contending government factions and the military.

“There were no police on the street,” Sabri recalls of the worst moments leading up to Mubarak’s exit. “It was very scary. We had to guard our homes. We would stay up all night in the street with whatever we could carry — a bat or a piece of metal — just to defend ourselves. There were criminals and guns firing all the night. Everything was moving very fast and we didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. We didn’t know what was right or wrong [politically], so our prayer was: ‘God, whatever You think is right, we are asking for Your will to be applied.’”

Mubarak stepped down Feb. 11, unleashing a wave of euphoria among millions of young Egyptians calling for freedom. Political tensions have eased in the months since, or at least moved to other stages, as the military runs the government while the nation prepares for elections in September. World news coverage has shifted to more violent locales — such as Libya, Syria and Yemen — as movements for change continue to shake the Arab world.

Police have returned to the streets of Egypt’s cities, but crime is on the rise.

“Business is not yet back to normal,” Sabri reports. “The police are scared of taking action because they are afraid the people will attack them.”

Everyone is “holding their breath” and waiting for what happens next, adds a recent visitor, as the young reformists, the old power structure, the military, secularists and Islamists jockey for position. Despite the disillusionment of recent days, a deep sense of pride in the change that has been accomplished remains from the early, heady days of the demonstrations.

“They are proud of what they have done, and there seems to be a sense of hope about the future that we haven’t really seen in the past,” says the visitor, who lived in Egypt for many years. “There’s also a great deal of caution, like they’re trying not to get too excited. One man said, ‘It’s going to be five years before we see the results.’”

What about prospects for minority Christians, who continue to suffer attacks by Muslim extremists?

The worst such incident in recent weeks occurred May 7, when a radical Muslim group, the Salafis, assaulted a Coptic Christian area of Cairo. The attack resulted in 12 deaths, at least 200 injuries and the burning of two churches. Enraged, Copts took to the streets to fight back. The Salafi movement, Coptic leaders charge, is trying to foment sectarian civil war between the Muslim majority and Coptic Christians, who comprise about 10 percent of Egypt’s 83 million people.

The conflict illustrates divisions that could sabotage change throughout the Arab world, according to Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times.

“The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship,” they wrote in a May 21 article examining the fissures confronting reform movements.

“But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era. … [T]he question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?”

The situation is “supremely complicated,” says Sabri, who urges outsiders not to jump to conclusions about where Egypt is headed. “For Mubarak to step down, that’s a miracle. For unity between average Egyptian people in the street — Christians and Muslims together — that’s a miracle that’s still happening now. There are miracles happening from a spiritual point of view.”

The many young, educated people who demonstrated for democracy in Tahrir Square support religious liberty for all Egyptians, he believes. Other forces do not — including the influential Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak but now allowed to participate in politics.

“I would be very concerned if the Muslim Brotherhood or the extremists get power over the parliament,” Sabri warns. “If they write the new constitution, it will be more tight on us as Christians. They’re not going to do it through violence. They’ll try to do it very smoothly so they don’t lose international support.”

Some Christians don’t intend to stick around to find out which scenario plays out. They’re leaving the country, or considering it. Sabri, however, isn’t going anywhere. He’s using this historic moment to share the hope of Christ with other Egyptians.

“Muslims are asking a lot of direct questions — questions we’re not used to being asked” without years of relationship building, he says. “Now you can meet somebody in the subway and he or she wants to know the truth.”
*(Name changed)

After Osama's death: violence or mercy?

Flying into Cairo on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, we heard something terrible was happening in New York and in Washington, D.C., the city we had departed approximately 15 hours earlier.

A photographer and I had come to gather material for a profile of the great Egyptian city. But as we watched the planes fly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on our hotel-room TVs — and learned who was behind the attacks — we wondered if and when we would be able to leave the hotel, much less the country. How would a couple of nervous Americans fare on the “Arab street” in that moment?

The next morning, we decided to find out.

No sooner did we emerge from a taxi in a Cairo neighborhood than we were surrounded by a crowd of Egyptian Muslims — not to be taunted or threatened, but to be comforted. They led us by the arm to a nearby coffee shop and surrounded our table, offering the passionate expressions of friendship and condolence for which Arabs are famous.

They didn’t want to believe Muslims had participated in the airborne attacks on thousands of innocents. They begged us to convey their grief and deepest sympathies to the victims’ families and to all Americans when we went home.

“We would never do this,” one man urgently repeated, tears in his eyes, as he gripped my hand. And he meant it.

But Osama bin Laden would do it.

A veteran terrorist determined to exact revenge for his many grievances against America and the West, bin Laden was quite willing to plan the attacks, carry them out through his al-Qaida terror network — and proudly claim responsibility for them. And it was only the beginning, he promised. Many more assaults would come and many more innocent people would die until the terrorists’ aims were accomplished.

So began the attacks and counterattacks, the violence and retaliation, the skirmishes and full-scale wars that continue to this day across multiple borders. But Osama bin Laden is dead, shot down May 1 in a U.S. operation after a nearly decade-long manhunt that began in the days following 9/11. Few war-weary people — not just in the West but also in the Muslim-majority nations most affected by his bloody ideology — will mourn him.

Will he become a martyr? An enduring symbol of radical Islamic defiance of the decadent West? An inspiration to new waves of terrorist true believers? Perhaps. Even if al-Qaida has suffered a mortal blow, others will take up its radical cause. The United States and other nations will take the actions they see as necessary to defend themselves and their interests. The cycle of attack and counterattack might continue.

However, the “Arab Spring” now under way in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa suggests an alternative future. Millions of young adults are bravely — and nonviolently — pushing for change and freedom, even in the face of violent repression in some countries. Their aspirations, openly expressed on the streets and through the potent tools of social media, suggest that history might (emphasis on might) have rendered the bin Ladens of the world irrelevant.

These peaceful revolutions will be hijacked by extremists or crushed by dictators in some places, but in others they will take root.

In another generation, young Muslims might even reject radical Islamism altogether. Naïve? Who would have believed that the Soviet empire would collapse in the space of a few years? The pace of change in our era is unprecedented in human history.

Whatever happens in the political realm in the days to come, however, an unseen kingdom is silently spreading across the region: the kingdom of God. It is a kingdom of justice and mercy, and its power comes from divine love, not weapons of war. It is beholden to no earthly nation; it transcends all cultures.

Muslims, like all other people, hunger for God. Millions of Muslims are seeking Him. More and more are finding Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. Persecution of Christians and churches in the Muslim world has increased, along with the exodus of many traditional Christians targeted by extremists. Yet reports of Muslims deciding to follow Christ, regardless of the consequences, continue to emerge from across the world. They continue to tell of dreams and visions of Jesus, of their desire for a close relationship with a God of mercy, of indescribable joy when they meet Him.

As we walked the streets of Cairo that sad day after 9/11, a Muslim man approached us near Al-Azhar University, the intellectual center of Sunni Islam for more than a millennium. Every night for years, he said, when he closed his eyes to sleep, he had seen a bright cross. “What does this mean?” he asked. We told him of the Lord who extends mercy and salvation to all who seek Him.

Don’t be afraid to tell the person who may ask you. The love of Christ is a far more powerful force than hatred, fear, war or vengeance.