10 Years Later...

Sun 11 Sep 2011 Filed in: Reflections
Some moments are etched indelibly into memory. Virtually everyone old enough to remember can vividly visualize where they were and what they were doing when they heard the awful news ten years ago. I was on I-5 south of Seattle heading north with the radio on ready to respond to any bad news traffic report, but the bad news wasn’t about traffic. A plane had hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center? How could that be? I was still trying to wrap my mind around what I was hearing when the report of a second plane hitting the second tower removed any doubt that it was deliberate. The reality began sinking in: We were at war, and I would be called on to make sense out of this chaos for students whose ordered lives were not ready for that reality.

A painful decade later I face the question, how has 9/11 altered your life? Some of the answers are obvious; when I fly I get to the airport a lot earlier. Others are less obvious but more significant. It is harder to ignore how indescribably evil sin is. To celebrate the wanton loss of innocent life for the sake of a lie is hard for me to fathom. That’s the bad news, but there is a good news side to it as well. If I begin to grasp how awful evil is, then I also begin to explore the unreachable depths of God’s grace, a grace that is greater than the awfulness of sin - even the awfulness of 9/11.

Evil has not diminished. The world is no better than it was ten years ago; it is still a mess. But God is not diminished either. And until I trade in this world for the next, I choose to rest in His unfailing love.
Happy

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