November 23, 2020 (Monday)
Yesterday’s blog was about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas November 22, 1963. Tomorrow’s blog will be about our church services in Dallas two days after the assassination. Today I want to mention another eventful group of days in Dallas in October, 1962: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Of course, the crisis was not only about Dallas; it was about the world. It was a direct confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, between the United States and the Soviet Union. The president addressed the nation about the seriousness of the situation, and subsequent narratives of our history during that time have confirmed that the world was on the precipice of a nuclear war.
I mention Dallas because there were two Sundays while I was pastor in Dallas that our church was filled with worshipers. The one written about in our blog for tomorrow was the Sunday following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. Six hundred people crowded into our sanctuary where 135 people usually worshiped Sunday by Sunday.
Over a year before that Sunday, however, the church had a similar experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The sanctuary was filled with people. Mayor Earle Cabell had appealed on News Media for the citizens of Dallas to pray. Sunday, October 28, was designated by him as a Day of Prayer. Messages went out to the citizens of Dallas that they should pray and get prepared by buying batteries and necessary items to survive in case the worst case scenario came into being. He pointed out that we should stay at home with our families and not venture out to escape the city.
Civil Defense Authorities had posted exit routes that advised the people that certain roads were to be used in case of a disaster of some kind. Now we were being told to ignore those routes, because when the reality of actually exiting the city became clear, the authorities easily saw that such a mass exit from a city like Dallas would result in bumper to bumper stalled traffic, and deaths would soar. The possibility of real war became a sudden reality. As would be the case in 1963, during the Cuban Missile Crisis the churches were filled. Six hundred people worshiped in our church where 135 was the average attendance.
It was a surreal atmosphere that we were experiencing. Could this really be? Are we about to experience real war, and nuclear war at that? Is our world about to be snatched from us? Are we about to die? These questions suddenly were real questions, and we did not like the answers.
A movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis titled “Thirteen Days,” was released in 2000. The movie’s tagline was “You’ll never believe how close we came.”
As far as we know, the world has never, before or since, been that close to a nuclear holocaust. Could it happen again? That crisis ended when the Soviet leader backed down. Secret negotiations also took place. War was averted. Next time it may be different. Let us pray that it never happens. I love seeing crowds at church, but not as the last thing we ever do.