Do you remember what you were doing on September 10, 2001? It was a Monday. Did I watch Monday night football? Did I take my wife out to dinner? Did we rent a movie that night? Did I have a meeting that night? George Bush was preparing for a visit with Florida school children and thinking about his first year as president. He was thinking about his domestic agenda, tax cuts, and Education reform. None of us had a clue that night when we fell asleep that everything was about to change. Americans went to bed in a world we thought was safe and awoke the next day to a new reality. What things did we take for granted? What relationships did we take for granted? If we could go back to that day what would we do differently? Has the church provided answers and direction in a world that stopped making sense? There are kids in my youth group who don’t remember life before 9-11. How do I work through the rubble and make disciples of this generation? So, hugs your kids a little tighter, hold your spouse a little closer, talk to your parents on the phone a little longer, take life a little slower, and love a little stronger. Everything may change tomorrow.
I feel like you wrote the follow up to “Dance” by LeAnn Womack at the end of your post there.
I’m with you though. No one remembers what Sept. 10th was (except Ryan Adams shot a music video with the towers in the background for his song “New York, New York” on that day).
The interesting thing, is my knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 is no longer remorse, or hatred towards anyone for what happened. My knee-jerk reaction says, because of 9/11 I pay more at the pump and am completely inconvienced at the airports. It’s something that is scary, but probably more of the norm for most Americans. We were initially united by 9/11, now we seem to be inconvienced. What a pagan society we live in.
Every year at this time I think about that terrible day. I was inside a nightmare that seemed to be going in slow motion. My husband had a meeting on the morning of 9/11 with the port and transit authority in New York City. And since their offices were in the towers I had no way of knowing where Wayne was and if he was safe. I didn’t know it at the time but the meeting was at an Amtrak office across the river. Wayne watch as the second plane hit and then watched the first tower fall before the meeting was ended and he tried to get home to Philly. It was 2 hours before his cell phone started working and he could reach me to let me know he was safe. In those 2 hours I had to deal with calls from our children at college wanting to know if their dad was safe and the rest of the family wanting to know where he was. I cannot recall another time in my life when I felt so helpless and out of control.
The weeks after that were very hard for Wayne. He usually rode the train to New York every day and he had friends that he had made on the daily commute. A lot of his new friends were gone and the others who had made it out were very traumatized.
Since Philly isn’t to far from NYC there were a lot of families in our community that were personally affected by that horrible tragedy. I am reminded daily of what I could have lost and what I have to be thankful for. So many families did not have the outcome our family did.