9/11 Remembered
Here is something I wrote in the immediate aftermath:
An Ordinary Week (looking back on September 11, 2001) Thank you, God, for an ordinary week. While there were reports of terror and death all around me, you have given me the gift of an ordinary week. I went to work and did my job. There was satisfaction and frustration and politics and camaraderie. I came home to my family. Some joy, some tedium, some being driven crazy by each other. You know how families can be. I helped with the dishes, did some work around the house, folded the laundry. The kids, in between being wonderful, challenged and frustrated us. They even needed some disciplining. I wondered how I was going to get all the bills taken care of. My wife smiled at me. We fought a little bit, but nothing that didn't pass and leave the love behind. I went to church on Sunday and worshiped, distracted by the squirming and questioning of lively children. It was an ordinary week. We had a little bit out of the ordinary. Josh was upset because we didn't get a newspaper. He likes the weather maps. But the front page wouldn't have been ordinary, and he's such a sensitive child. He won't even pray his "special prayers" at night, because he didn't want to speak what he'd heard about New York and Washington, D.C. even to God. David will pray about it. He prays every night for the airplanes and the buildings and the firefighters and that the planes will get down safely. I never have the heart to tell him that they won't. My wife and I are in disbelief, and a little shock, that a building where we spent a week together is now a pile of rubble. We hold each other a little tighter. And we were relieved to find that our friend who lives and works around the Beltway had his flight on the ground a few hours before the terror began. So it was not entirely ordinary. But I am only an ordinary man with the ordinary responsibilities of life. I had no terror of waiting for the awful call (or worse, no call at all) regarding loved ones in the wrong building. I had no responsibility for coworkers in flight or where they might be stranded if the planes were still in the air at all. I had no position of ministry where the grieving and questioning would come and ask the unanswerable. I had no position of public office where more wisdom than can be humanly borne is demanded. I am only an ordinary man experiencing an ordinary week. Thank you, Lord, for this most precious treasure of an ordinary week.
Categories: Decline and Fall, Poetry
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