Sunday night, Raleigh-based evangelist Anne Graham Lotz will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 will hit the airwaves and the Internet with a special message. Many will welcome her words as prophetic and hopeful.

But I'm betting many others will wish she had, well, kept them to herself.

For starters, Lotz - whose father is Billy Graham - says maybe God was trying to get our attention with the tragedy. Maybe, she says, it was a wake-up call.

No, Lotz doesn't think God caused it to happen. In fact, she says it was "a plot hatched in hell."

But Lotz does think that maybe God could have protected America that day, but didn't, because of the signals she says we've been sending him.

"We've been telling him to get out of our business, out of our government, out of our schools, out of our marketplace. And then when something like this happens, we wonder where he is," Lotz told me in a phone interview this week.

"But God is a gentleman. He doesn't go where he's told to get out."

Lotz, who's 63, said all the deaths that day changed her ministry, made her even more determined to spread the Gospel.

"It was just horrifying," she said. "I just wondered how many people...were stepping into eternity and they were not ready to meet God because people like me hadn't told them how they could be ready, that (God) loved them, that he wanted them to live with him forever in heaven."

I had to ask: Was Lotz telling me that many of the victims would not be going to heaven because they had not accepted Jesus as their savior?

Her answer: The Bible says that there's only one way to God, and that's through Jesus.

"I would expect that there were many people in those towers who had not placed their faith in Jesus, who had not come to the cross, confessed their sins, received God's forgiveness. The Bible says ...they won't see God."

Not even if they were victims?

"Being a victim or not being a victim doesn't determine whether you go to heaven or hell. It's your relationship with God, it's your faith in Jesus," she said.

"I'm so thankful that God is the judge. I don't have to stand by and judge people."

'Expecting to See Jesus'

Lotz is also expected to say something else Sunday night. Namely, that she thinks Jesus' return to earth could come very soon. (She makes the case in her book, "Expecting to See Jesus.")

In the Gospel of Matthew, she said, Jesus said the "last generation" would see certain signs - and see them with pronounced frequency and intensity.

Yes, she acknowledged, Christians since Paul have been predicting the imminent return of the kingdom. But the signs in past times were just birth pangs, she said. But her generation - Lotz was born in 1948 - has seen Israel rejoin the family of nations, which she said is one sign.

They have seen the Gospel preached to the whole world, via TV, radio, the Internet and crusades - another sign.

And the natural disasters, she said, are worse than ever.

"We see that in the storms, the floods, the forest fires," she said. "They're not only occurring more frequently, but when they occur, they break the record of the last one."

And what distinguishes Lotz's prediction from the one earlier this year claiming the rapture would happen May 21?

"I think it was a very dangerous thing that he did," Lotz said of Harold Camping. "Jesus said that you cannot know the day nor the hour ... But Jesus gave us enough signs that we could know the generation."