Remembering 9-11 and knowing that a 10-18 is coming

September 11 is a date that conjures up vivid memories for Americans. Even if you were too young to remember the horrific events of that day, still you feel the pain because we relive it each year on that date. We fill our Facebook walls with photos of the Twin Towers, the American flag, our Patriot Day motto of “NEVER FORGET.” We sit glued to the TV watching specials that take us back to the day the music died, the day we had our innocence stripped from us, the day the world changed forever.

This day haunts me every year. Why? Because–and you may think I’m crazy–I knew it was coming. I didn’t exactly know WHAT was going to happen, but I knew that September 11 was a day that would mean something. If you’re not a Christian, you may scoff at this. But if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you know that He sometimes prepares His people for what is coming. Prophecy is still working in this world.

And if you’re not a Christian, you will not understand the emphasis I am about to put on Israel. It will seem foreign and even ridiculous to you. But if you are a Believer, then you just might understand the focus on the Jewish homeland, unless you are one of those Christians who believe that Israel is nothing any more. I beg to differ. Israel is our timepiece for the future, and the Jews are still the apple of God’s eye, as are His followers worldwide. (Let me clarify that Jesus is the only means of salvation, even for the Jews.)

The experience of which I write actually began a few years before 9/11. I had been prone to have spiritual dreams for many years–dreams that were sometimes even prophetic. Then one night I dreamed that I was arriving at the Stokes County Fair with my children. But somehow the fair was being canceled. Some men came out of the Legion building and said, “Haven’t you heard? The world will never be the same again.”

I never forgot the tense, doomsday-gray atmosphere of that dream. I wrote it down and literally pondered it often for the years before 9/11. Each year when the local fair began, I anticipated some sort of world-changing event.

Then came 2001. The Thursday before 9/11 (that would’ve been 9/6), I was having my morning prayer in my bedroom. I was in the floor on my face.

If you want to know the truth, I was praying a very selfish prayer that focused totally on me. I had been stricken with a mysterious illness in October 2000 and was still very unwell just 11 months later. I was asking God to give me strength to go on.

Suddenly, I heard the Lord speak to me–not in an audible voice but in that way that He imputes something into your brain that you know is Him speaking. He said, “Psalm 83.” Still being in that selfish mode, I jumped up with excitement, just sure that the Lord was giving me a Psalm that would bring me great comfort in my tribulation.

I had no idea what Psalm 83 was, but hey, it was a Psalm–those were mostly all encouraging, weren’t they?

Not this one.

I sat on the edge of my bed, facing the window that looked out at the lovely September morning, feeling quite confused as I read this Psalm. It had an ominous tone to it–all about the enemies of God doing something horrible to cut off Israel. The passage told me who those enemies were. I looked them up in the concordance and found that the descendants of these kingdoms mentioned in the Psalm were the Arab nations who hate Israel today.

Here is the Biblical passage so that you can see what I read that day, per His instructions:

Psalm 83

New King James Version (NKJV)

Prayer to Frustrate Conspiracy Against Israel

A Song. A Psalm of Asaph.

83 Do not keep silent, O God!
Do not hold Your peace,
And do not be still, O God!
² For behold, Your enemies make a tumult;
And those who hate You have lifted up their head.
³ They have taken crafty counsel against Your people,
And consulted together against Your sheltered ones.
⁴ They have said, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation,
That the name of Israel may be remembered no more.”

⁵ For they have consulted together with one consent;
They form a confederacy against You:
⁶ The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites;
Moab and the Hagrites;
⁷ Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek;
Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre;
⁸ Assyria also has joined with them;
They have helped the children of Lot. Selah

⁹ Deal with them as with Midian,
As with Sisera,
As with Jabin at the Brook Kishon,
¹⁰ Who perished at En Dor,
Who became as refuse on the earth.
¹¹ Make their nobles like Oreb and like Zeeb,
Yes, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,
¹² Who said, “Let us take for ourselves
The pastures of God for a possession.”

¹³ O my God, make them like the whirling dust,
Like the chaff before the wind!
¹⁴ As the fire burns the woods,
And as the flame sets the mountains on fire,
¹⁵ So pursue them with Your tempest,
And frighten them with Your storm.
¹⁶ Fill their faces with shame,
That they may seek Your name, O Lord.
¹⁷ Let them be confounded and dismayed forever;
Yes, let them be put to shame and perish,
¹⁸ That they may know that You, whose name alone is the Lord,
Are the Most High over all the earth.

At the same time that this Psalm became such a huge part of my life, I was suddenly hit by the importance of these numbers: 911. Not as in “nine-one-one” but “nine-eleven.” I racked my brain for what 9-11 meant. The numbers kept rushing through my head for the days preceding the Twin Towers attack.

I even called my dear friend Heather to ask her if we had stayed in a room 911 during our recent travels to Irish dance competitions. It had become a joke to my family and friends how seriously I took the numbers of our hotel rooms at these events. I would always attach some significance to the room numbers, which was probably silly.

But for some reason, I couldn’t remember some of the room numbers from our summer trips–some of which I had taken with Heather and her kids. Heather couldn’t remember either, but she said she didn’t think we stayed in a 911. I told her I couldn’t figure out the significance of those numbers which were mentally screaming at me.

I confess that I didn’t really connect 911 to the actual date of the upcoming September 11. So when that date came, all I knew is that, due to the Psalm, I needed to pray for Israel and her allies–which of course included the U.S perhaps first of all.

I was on the couch in my den on that infamous day, talking to my sister Lori on the phone about meeting up at the Stokes County Fair that afternoon. I had already canceled the habitual Tuesday night prayer meeting at our house, so that my family could go to the fair. The TV was on PBS–probably “Sesame Street.” Some of my kids were obviously awake already.

Suddenly Lori said, “Do you have your TV on? Jon [her husband] says turn it to Channel 12. Something’s going on.” I called out to one of the kids to turn it to WXII. Somewhere in the mix of things, I believe Heather beeped through to tell me to turn on my TV. That part is foggy.

As the kids switched channels, suddenly I saw a picture of the North Tower of the World Trade Centers with smoke pouring from it. Lori told me that Jon was saying a plane had flown into it. I was astounded and at first thought it was a joke.

But it was no joke. Still I had no clue that it was terrorism. I simply assumed that a plane had lost control innocently and hit the building–a terrible tragedy, yes, but nothing more than a mere accident.

I kept watching and then was shocked to see the other plane hit the South Tower. It was then that I, and the rest of the world, knew this was terrorism. And I thought of Psalm 83 and my dream so long ago of a world-changing event occurring the very day I was going to the fair, and suddenly the absolute horror of my preoccupation with 911 for the preceding days hit me. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt–because of the Psalm–that it was a terrorist attack against us because of our support of Israel.

I even knew who did it, thanks to the Psalm–the Arab nations who hate Israel and who hate us for our allegiance to Israel. When I first got sick in October 2000, the USS Cole had just been bombed and no one was sure who to blame. I woke up in the night during the miserable sickness, tossing and turning and moaning the name, “Osama bin Laden” over and over again. I knew then he was the mastermind behind the ship bombing.

And on the morning of September 11, I knew unequivocally that bin Laden was behind the planes flying into the Trade Towers.

And let’s just say that we didn’t go to the fair that night; instead we reconvened the hitherto-canceled prayer meeting at our house.

A few years later, I attended a Feast of Tabernacles celebration in the fall at Ridgecrest Christian Conference Center in Black Mountain, NC.  I felt led to choose a workshop taught by a woman named Dee Baxter. It was called “The Islam Agenda.”

I had no clue that Dee was going to teach a lot about the significance of 9/11. She told us that the 9th letter of the Hebrew alphabet looks like a snake coiled to strike and that the 11th letter looks like a bird in flight. “9-11–the devil attacks through planes?” she was basically questioning.

Then Dee said something that made my skin crawl. She said that the 11th letter represents judgment and that Psalm 83 was key in this study because 8 + 3 = 11. She said that Psalm 83 tells us exactly who perpetrated the 9/11 attack on America–the Arab nations in confederacy against Israel. Dee told us that Mohammed originally prophesied in the Koran that the end of days will begin when Muslims worldwide join together to wipe out Israel. I have never read the Koran, but according to Dee, the version we read today has been sanitized.

I sat in that class in total disbelief. This renowned Bible teacher, whom I did not know, was confirming what God had told me BEFORE September 11, 2001.

Added on 9/15/12–**It hit me after originally posting this blog that this year was the 11th year since 9/11/01. With the emphasis on 11 as judgment, we need to think on that as well.**

What is the significance of all of this? Why would God tell me that information ahead of time yet I not totally discern what it meant until it actually happened? I believe He used this as a training exercise for me and to let me know to be listening to Him as the end times hasten toward us. A very spiritual woman at my former church in Winston-Salem had come to me in the late ’90s and told me she had had a spiritual dream about me knowing things before they happened. She spoke a word of wisdom to me: that I should listen carefully to the Lord and tell her and others if an upcoming event was revealed to me.

I did have another prophetic experience before the horrific tsunami in the region of Indonesia–too long to go into here. But very little else since then.

There was, however, one more thing that I was told which I am hanging onto until it happens. Not very long after 9/11/01, I awakened abruptly one morning with the numbers “10-18” imprinted in my brain, as if God had put them there. It was urgent that I find out what they meant.

Since 10-18 sounds like a CB radio term, I called Heather whose husband is a fireman. I also talked to my friend Sandra whose husband is also a fireman. I can’t recall now which one of them called me back excitedly to tell me that a 10-18 is an emergency response, with lights flashing and sirens sounding. “Urgent response needed, complete present assignment quickly.”

I knew then that another 9/11-type attack was coming. This time it would be a 10-18 rather than a 911 call, symbolically. I will admit that I was doubly alert each October 18th after that–in case the 10-18 represented a date the way 9-11 did. I even pondered whether it would happen on the 18th day of the 10th Jewish month, since I was so heavily studying the Jewish calendar.

To this day, I don’t fully understand why 10-18 was given to me–even confirmed in another significant way in the past few years. I simply know that this nation will face another terrorist attack. My feeling is that it will be even worse than 9/11. Do not go quote me as saying that 10-18 represents a date. I never said that. I have no idea. It probably just represents the urgent nature of what is headed our way, the way 10-18 represents “Respond with urgency.”

Those of you who know me can testify that I am a very optimistic idealist who lives her life wearing rose-colored glasses. I am not a doomsday prophet. I am not telling you to store up beans, Bibles and bullets.

Instead I am telling you to store up the Word of God, His Spirit, His love. Make sure that you are spiritually prepared. When you are, then if you need to prepare physically, He’ll let you know. I am leery of many non-spiritual people who are spending all of their time and money storing up things for the coming collapse. I, on the other hand, feel to give away as much as I can, to reach out to the world rather than to focus on self-preservation.

(Disclaimer: I feel that everyone–Christian and non-Christian–should be physically prepared to survive in case of natural or man-made disaster. In the previous paragraph, I am talking about many people who are putting TOO much focus on and money into physical preparation at the expense of spiritual focus. But IF GOD has told you to store up things, who am I to judge another man’s servant?)

Another thing I am telling you is that we as the United States cannot abandon Israel. Not that they can’t take care of themselves–they are B-B-B-BAD. But any nation that turns on them will not prosper.

I hesitated to write this blog for fear of being called crazy or being talked about. But you know what? I realized that I’m not particularly worried any more what people think of me, as long as I know my Savior is leading me and is my focus.

It is time to seek the Lord.