Connect360: Search & Rescue

• Lesson Eight in the Connect360 unit “Find Us Faithful: Standing Firm in Our Faith” focuses on 2 Peter 2:4-9

At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, our nation was shaken.

A truck with a homemade bomb was parked outside of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and detonated killing 187 men, women and children.

I was living in Arlington at that time, serving in my first church, and many in my family were living just a few miles north of where the bomb detonated.

When I heard on the news what had happened, I began calling my family first and then friends I went to college with to make sure everyone was OK.

Two days after the bombing, I drove up to Edmond, Okla., to see my parents, and the next day my mom and I drove down to the bombing site.

We had to park 10 blocks away and then walk in. As we got about five blocks out, we saw broken windows on buildings, and as we got within a block from the site, we saw buildings in the area had been severely damaged.

When we walked up to the site, what we saw was beyond anything we ever thought we would see in this great country of ours.

The building looked like something from a Third World, war-torn country. Rescuers were swarming over the rubble desperately looking for anyone that might have survived the explosion and lived through the last 72 hours under the rubble of the building.

These men and women worked around the clock to save as many people as they could, and when they knew there was no one left alive, they refused to leave until they had recovered every last victim so their families could have some closure.

The rescuers knew nothing about the victims. They didn’t know if they were good or bad people. They had no idea if they deserved the effort of being saved.

All these men and women knew was there were people who need to be saved, and they did everything they could to save them.

God feels the same way about us; except he knows everything about us.

He knows we are not good people. He knows we sin, often.

He knows how we treat others. He knows we are selfish and self-serving and still he sees us worthy of being saved. He moved heaven and earth to provide a way to save us. He sent his one and only Son to die in our place so we could have an eternal relationship with him.

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