Don Wildmon
AFA/AFR founder
February 1999 – One recent morning during staff devotions, we shared a letter which did not ask for prayer, but which indicated a real need for prayer. The person had written these words: “Please remove me from your mailing list. I have quit caring.”
When I heard those words my heart sank. Those words are the hardest to take.
Since last summer, support for your AFA has been dropping. By December, normally our best month, support had dropped by nearly 50%. Why? We are trying as hard, working as hard. The issues we are dealing with are still there. Why then this drop?
I had already reached a conclusion, and the note from the former supporter confirmed it.
The mess in Washington has had a terrible effect on our society. We have turned away from God so far that there is no longer a common sense of right and wrong. Good is called bad and bad is called good. The media and other institutions of influence have pounded us with the idea that our leaders have no moral responsibility.
All of this is taking a toll on those who care and who have been fighting the good fight. The devil is happiest when he hears these words: “I have quit caring.”
It has been 22 years since I founded AFA. It has, in many ways, been a difficult 22 years. We have won some battles, and we have lost some. But we have not quit caring, and we have tried to be faithful.
At 61 years of age, I realize that this battle is no longer for me or those of my generation but for those who come after us – the children. We must not, we cannot, quit now.
For the sake of the children who come after us, I beg you never to quit caring, never to give up. We need you to continue the fight. We need you to write letters, make phone calls, pray, vote, speak out and work in a hundred other ways.
Let me close with a poem by Will Allen Dromgoole. It expresses why AFA continues the battle and why I hope you will also.
The Bridge Builder
An old man, going a lone highway
Came at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide;
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head:
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair‑haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
God friend, I am building the bridge for him." 
