We Remember

Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

I was at our first house in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  Charlotte was 14 months old, and we had just found out that we were expecting Elijah.  Jeff was working at Nissan and called me sometime after 9:00 to ask if I had the TV on.

I spent the remainder of the day, in between times of taking care of my baby, watching the devastation unfold.

Often, when we speak of 9-11, what we remember is this century’s equivalent to the JFK assassination or my generation’s Challenger explosion.  We remember exactly where we were and what we were doing, and I think that’s normal.  We are, after all, most immediately concerned with ourselves and those closest to us.

However, the stories of heroism in the midst of the 9-11 tragedy have also really stuck with me.  I remember Todd Beamer and actually looked up today what was going on with his widow, Lisa, whose book I read a couple years later.  (She remarried a couple years ago.)  I saw a photo in our county’s free newspaper memorial edition of a firefighter running through a tunnel to get to Ground Zero who perished shortly thereafter.  I listened to bits of different memorial services, in which people were reading names, including those of people they had personally lost.

As we don’t really have a TV, I haven’t been watching the extensive coverage leading up to today.  But I’ve found that even the little bit that I have read and seen via internet is more than enough to bring the horror of that day flooding back.  I’ve been surprised at how strong the memories are, not like something ten years past.

So, while this post is still littered with the first-person pronoun, I hope that my remembrance of today becomes less and less of where I was and what I was doing and more and more about the bigger picture.  I hope that I can put into practice Psalm 46:10, which our pastor read this morning in his words about 9-11:  “Be still, and know that I am God.”  I hope that I can always believe that God cares about what’s going on down here, even when it’s something as horrific as the events of 10 years ago. 

May God bless America.