I was still working as a travel agent on 9/11. That previous August, I had met the woman I would marry just a few years later… and she worked in NYC at the time. So, between phone calls from stranded clients (who were rightly afraid yet strangely patient) and peering over my cubicle to see the latest news, I tried desperately to reach Heidi.
Phone lines were down, so getting a call through was impossible. Instead, I emailed. I sent private messages. I prayed a lot, too. The website through which Heidi and I had met was asking all the New York members to let their online friends know they were safe. I checked and checked to see if Heidi posted. I don’t know how long it was before she was able to alleviate my worries, but she finally did. She was okay…or as okay as you can be when violence rips its way into your world in such a personal way.
It was all a blur, really. I took more calls than I could count. I tried my very best to get stranded travelers home any way I could. Those business men who were typically so quick to grumble and curse over an unavailable upgrade or the wrong size rental car suddenly found within themselves a great patience and understanding. A few offered to share their rental car with other stranded travelers. The tragedy had suddenly made us all more human perhaps than we had been before that first plane struck.
I wasn’t a New Yorker and had not yet visited that writer’s paradise, but it was the home of someone I had come to care greatly about… and it had been senselessly violated. With the rest of the world, I watched in horror as those events unfolded and with no less horror I remember them today. As I left work that afternoon, I stepped outside into a bright and sunny day filled with the fragrance of flowers and the music of birds nesting nearby. And standing there in the parking lot, I wept. I wept because it hurt to think that I (as undeserving as any man has ever been) had been blessed with a day of beauty and safety when the fine people of New York—men, women and children who had started their day believing it held that same promise—were, instead, subjected to chaos and death. It just didn’t seem possible.
As a Christian, I’ve always believed the world is essentially broken because man is so deeply broken. Mankind so often looks for new reasons to hate and to hurt—to divide instead of unite. But, in God’s goodness, He placed something of Himself within us that reacts to the greatest evils we manage to concoct. There is within us, in those darkest of moments, a courage that we saw in display among the police, the firemen, the military, and the brave few who ran back into those towers and lost their lives in the pursuit of saving others. So, while I remember that day for the evil and violence perpetrated on the city of New York, I also choose to remember the men and women who stood as shining examples of God’s grace and the heroism men can be capable of when we put the needs of others ahead of our own.
May God save us from ourselves and give us grace and mercy for those whose hearts are still wounded from the evil done that day.
