Prayer: Where a nation in turmoil ought to turn

OPINION:

Coming to Washington, D.C., in October is a multi-day “Awaken the Dawn” gathering aimed entirely at glorifying Jesus.

This is much-needed and well-timed.

Atheist-progressive-secularists would rather cut their tongues out than admit this — but the prayers, set for the National Mall starting October 6, would be quite approved by Founding Fathers.

Yes, all you atheists out there: the founders prayed. A lot.

The ATD gathering, which promises 50-plus tents from 50 states “filled with music, prayer and worship, day and night,” is a real John 1:5 moment.

That’s the verse that reads: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

It’ll be followed by a separate one-day affair, “The Call,” described on its website as “a fast, not a festival,” — so be prepared for true worship, not celebrity entertainment.

Truly, it’s high time for Jesus to be invited into D.C. Amid all the swampy waters — the swirling DACA talk, the hovering Hillary Clinton email scandal, the ongoing hurricane tragedies — is a desperation for the nation to heal.

All the nation — not just some in the Republican Party, a few on the Democratic side. All. Even the antifa thugs — yes, you. It’s time for a time-out.

Prayer is the way to go. It’s how our Founding Fathers often responded to political crises. Really, it’s often how they started their day-to-day business.

“At its initial meeting in September 1774, Congress invited the Reverend Jacob Duche, rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, to open its sessions with prayer,” the Library of Congress notes.

That started a chain reaction of subsequent congressional calls to chaplains to open sessions — a tradition that continues to this day.

“Congress proclaimed days of fasting and of thanksgiving annually throughout the Revolutionary War,” the Library of Congress also notes.

One such call in May of 1776 entreated citizens of all colonies to join in a “day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” and “confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions.”

This is the Library of Congress recording this history — not a partisan or religious organization. This is the accurate history of how our founders acted, thought, spoke. Prayer, in brief, was a big deal.

So was humility before God.

There’s this: “Congress set December 18, 1777, as a day of thanksgiving on which the American people ’may express the grateful feelings of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor.’” Again, from the Library of Congress.

A few years later, Congress did it again.

“Congress set November 28, 1782, as a day of thanksgiving on which Americans were to ’testify their gratitude to God for his goodness, by a cheerful obedience to his laws, and by promoting, each in his station, and by his influence, the practice of true and undefiled religion,” the Library of Congress noted.

There’s more — much more.

But the general idea is this: Praying for our nation isn’t just a Sunday church tradition. It’s a daily doing — or should be — and moreover, it’s one that rightly belongs smack at the center of America’s politics. Atheists, progressives and secularists would have it believed that religion and politics do not mix, and in America, never did.

But that’s a lie. Our founders were always praying, always looking to above for heavenly guidance. Granted, some did more than others. But that doesn’t make them atheists. It makes them human.

In the lead-up to the elections, Rev. Franklin Graham went on a 50-state tour to pray with believers for the direction of our nation.

The divisiveness, the hate-filled rhetoric, the violence has not abated.

So to God we must go.

It’s time, as ATD notes on its site, for what one Christian leader called “a new Jesus movement, a Holy Spirit Woodstock.” It kicks off October 6.

Coincidentally, that’s the same time when all of Israel would normally gather to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles — and it’s also the 20-year anniversary of the Promise Keepers’ million-man march on the National Mall.

Revival seems set in God’s plans.