Lots of Berliners talked of Ronald Reagan’s speech, delivered in
Berlin, almost two years earlier, when he demanded:”Mr. Gorbachev, Tear
Down this Wall!” Was President Reagan’s dramatic call about to happen?
Some Berliners worried the soldiers would take charge. No one knew.
Ironically, the worst source of information was the media, perhaps
because in 1987 so many had underestimated the importance of Reagan’s
speech. The New York Times declared that Reagan had “lost the air of
authority” and suggested that Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech was “surreal”
and indicated that the “presidency had ceased to function.” The
Washington Post, and U.S. News & World Report has also been highly
critical.
But, in November 1989, Berliners remembered the power of a U.S.
president calling for the hateful wall to be torn down. Each person to
whom I spoke, seemed to know someone, a family member or friend, who
had been trapped on the other side of the wall. Hope was alive,
powerful and focused on tearing down the Wall. -"I Helped Tear Down the Wall"
(Tim) Grant Olson, the producer of the video at the bottom of this post, was an elder at our church some years back. Since then, he's gone on to serve in Campus Crusade's work in Eastern Europe. Although I'm in strong disagreement with Crusade's relegation of the Church to the sideline of evangelism and discipleship, since the fall of communism twenty years ago, it's been a great joy to see how Crusade has poured men into Eastern Europe where they've boldly proclaimed Jesus Christ.
There was some glamor in the early years, but that glamor has long since departed. The callouses Marxism left on men's hearts are real. Also, the systemic poverty and corruption that is Communism's legacy remains intractable in many of the Eastern European countries. The glory days of the first opening of Eastern Europe are long gone and what's left for those giving themselves to the people of countries such as Albania, Hungary, and Romania is very tough slogging.
So God bless Campus Crusade and her men and women who have loved Eastern Europeans with the Gospel of Jesus Christ!
All this on the occasion of our arrival, today, at the Twentieth Anniversary of the act of God pulling down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Men of towering courage and strength like Lech Walesa, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were putty in God's hands to bring down the bloodiest ideology and greatest oppression man had known up until that time. (It's since been dwarfed by feminism's victims, one billion and counting.)
In my office is a picture Dad had been given by the artist who drew it. He had the drawing on the wall of his study and loved it...
and learned that the sort of leaders profiled by the New Yorker and the NYTimes Magazine will talk about love for the people and national compassion while demonstrating an
astounding selfishness in their own personal lives. 