Pompeii or America?

.  Pompeii had been a one time a capital of beauty, the home of grand architecture, exquisite painting, enchanting sculpture—and unrestrained sin.  Within three days the city was  transformed from a thriving port into a hugh burial vault, sealed beneath twenty feet of rock and ash.  Entombed in the vault lay 16,000 Pompeians—eighty percent of the city’s population.  For seventeen hundred years, lay buried and without anything to show its place of doom; then modern exploration scooped out of it the lava of Vesuvies and uncovered an as if in ancient city, preserved as in a museum. Homes there were without roofs or windows.  We entered the museums, the temples the theatres.  We saw walks, the walls, the arches.  We read the inscriptions which had been made in the ancient Roman city preserved as if in a museum.  We examined the wonderful pictures on the walls and the most exquisite mosaic on the floor.

Pompeii is the best preserved of all the ancient cities.  We know what the people ate, how they dressed, even their hair styleyis.  There were plaster of Paris cast of spaces in the lava, once occupied by animals and humans made during the excavations when the digging crews accidentally hit a hollow space.  Carefully, the plaster was poured into the hollow, and a perfect replica of the person or animal was formed by the plaster as the lava was removed from the outside of the mold.  One cast was of a woman dressed in a lovely gown.   Another was of a wretched man with a chain about his wrist, perhaps a prisoner who tried to escape.  A woman was found clutching her adornments when the eruption began; and for nineteen hundred years, she has continued to clutch them.  As the tour kept looking they came upon the reason they think God blotted out the city.  On the walls were lewd paintings; in some of the gardens were great obscene sculptures, well preserved.  It was seventeen hundred years before Pompoii was uncovered. It was same with Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, and Nineveh.  Lest we forget God kept a record for us.   The encyclopedia said many saw the volcano coming, but like Lot’s wife they turned Abram begs God to spare them if ten people could be found, that believed in God.  Abram stopped to short.  He should have asked for less.  I’m sure Abram thought Lot and his family, and some of the servants believed in God.  Lot had three daughter married to Sodomites.  With his family it would be ten, so Abram felt safe to stop.  Like the king of Israel that stopped too short with the arrows and didn’t deliver Israel.  Do we stop short in our prayers and fail to win our love ones, our friends, and our nation. Abram had gone to prayer he kept going back, but failed to go back enough times.  He stopped too short are we?  Are we falling too short in praying for America?