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Can values make a comeback?

Wondering if 2013 will be the year we slow the moral decline

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The story is told in Philip Yancey’s book, “Finding God in Unexpected Places,” in East Germany every demonstration began with worship. (I’m not getting all spiritual on you here; I’m simply restating history.) Small groups would throw prayer meetings filled with political dissidents, concerned citizens, and some of those reprehensible Christians. After a period of prayer, pastors spoke while holding newspapers in one hand and Bibles in the other. Afterward participants went outside to walk peacefully through dark streets holding banners and candles.

In October 1989, as East Berlin was celebrating the 44th year of its communist regime, police were instructed to shoot demonstrators in Leipzig, where crowds had grown to nearly 500,000, but thankfully never did. On November 9, the crowd had doubled to one million when the unimaginable happened; a gap in the Berlin Wall opened. Without incident, candle-carrying East Germans peacefully filed through and over the wall, effectively bringing down the East German government in the process.

By years’ end, multiple Eastern Bloc countries joined East Germany’s fate, and by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. Hope sprung eternal and the world experienced a long-anticipated fresh breath of freedom because people put their faith and longing for freedom into action thus allowing the world to witness a miracle.

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