How Are You Different?
There are three things that will endure -- faith, hope, and love -- and the greatest of these is love. -- 1 Corinthians 13:13
Ten years is a long time. Life is different now. I doubt anyone remained unchanged by that day when suicide bombers took over airplanes, destroying two office towers filled with workers in New York City, hitting the Pentagon with a third plane, and then crashing a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field. So many innocent lives lost.
Americans learned quickly what was important that day. Our naïve thinking that we were safe on U.S. soil was destroyed forever. We realized that no matter how we plan or how much security screening we endure there is no real assurances that something horrible won’t happen again.
Where were you when you found out? What did you do? Were you afraid? My first thought was to check on co-workers. Only God’s grace kept me from being in Manhattan when the towers fell. I needed reassurance that my co-workers were okay and they were.
My next thoughts were to my family, thousands of miles away. Small town life can be a blessing sometimes. They were safe and likely to stay that way. Los Angeles was a ghost town. The fearless city dwellers who rarely vacated their cars stayed home. The silence was eerie. Scary.
I suspect many people prayed that day. People who rarely or never prayed. Because when your world is shaken to the core, when all that you counted on is no longer safe and secure, you turn instinctively to the One who can make it all better. You reach out to the One who can keep you safe and secure.
Alan Jackson wrote a song right after the attacks. It included this Bible verse in it. A reminder to love one another because that is what endures. In the weeks and months after the attacks, New York City became a nice place. It seems almost funny now. The people known for being rude and abrupt reached out to strangers with a smile and sincere hello. It was a different place.
Tragedy does that. It changes you. I wonder if I would be where I am had it not been for that day. I’d been thinking about a change but holding back. Fear of the unknown. A fear I was right to have, as time later showed me. Yet sometimes you have to take a risk, a chance to see if what you believe is true or whether things were never what they seemed. I suspect a great many people took risks after that day. There’s something about loosing that security of believing you’ll have another day, a better time, to make you seize the moment called today.
Today will be a day for remembering. Maybe we’ll also remember how we clung to God that day. How we held our loved ones close. How we smiled at strangers and cared about people we didn’t know. A lot of good lessons came out of that horrible day but they’re only good lessons if we remember what we learned.
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