A 9/11 Remembrance

On September 11, 2001, I was already about an hour and a half into my work day at The University of Akron, a beautiful Tuesday with azure blue skies and perfect temperatures.  Probably wishing I could be outside.  My phone rang and it was Doug, a co-worker, who also liked to get to work early.  His office was like a throw-back, with one of those finger-eating 1940s era fans and an antique radio that hummed and spit.  He said that the radio announcer reported that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. 

My first reaction was to pull up CNN online and see what they were reporting.  At that point Doug walked down the hall to my office and we saw a picture of the tower with smoke billowing out of a wide swath of its metal walls.  "That was no small plane," I told him.

Within a half an hour more people arrived at work and before long we had found one faculty member with a rabbit-eared TV that brought in one station.  We clustered about listening and then the second plane hit.  It was now obvious that it was terrorism and I suggested to no one in particular that it must have been Osama Bin Laden.

Here we are 12 years later and there are two huge pooled fountains where the towers once stood.  One World Trade is being finished up and is either soon to be occupied or is already occupied.  Manhattan's buildings have been repaired, the soot has cleared, and the wreckage was removed.  But it leaves every single one of us scarred by what happened on U.S. soil on a beautiful Tuesday in September.  We all knew that morning that life would never quite be the same for us or our children or our grandchildren.  We felt vulnerability.

It begs us to reflect on the freedoms we hold so dear, the ones given to us by our Creator.  Perhaps it makes us rally against the rants of those who demand freedom when they already have it.  It should cause us to take a moment and mentally list everything that our time grants us the opportunity to do because we are free!!

• Free to love and raise our children well, with respect for others and with a love for God.
• Free to give of our wealth to help others.
• Free to worship, to pray, to gather in the Lord's name.
• Free to take care of our responsibilities, to shoulder them with the help of a loving God.
• Free to listen and to watch and to discern the happenings about us.
• Free to love and care for others.
• Free to observe and enjoy the beauty of the earth that the Lord has made.
• Free to repent of our sins, of those times when our selfishness led us astray.
• Free to thank God for the gift of life.

So on this day, on this anniversary date, let us pray that nothing draws us away from the love of God and from doing his will.  On this day, let us affirm once again that the terrorists may have celebrated their victory, but that it was really no victory at all.  The sleeping giant awoke.