Twenty-Five Years Later

I was watching the news yesterday and they started rolling the countdown to September 11th's 25th anniversary. Twenty-five years. I blinked at that number.

If you're old enough to remember that morning, you remember where you were. The phone calls. The second plane. The sudden silence of the sky.

But what I keep thinking about isn't the towers at all. I keep thinking about where people were running.

Everyone in New York was running away from those buildings. That's what sane people do. And against all logic, a few hundred people strapped on gear and walked toward them. Walked into darkened stairwells that were falling apart, toward strangers they would never know.

One was a Catholic priest named Mychal Judge. He was the FDNY chaplain. He was 68 years old. He didn't have to do anything. He could have watched the towers burn from the safety of his living room. Instead, he walked into the lobby of the North Tower and prayed over the firefighters going up and the civilians coming down. The first confirmed death of September 11th was his. They have a photo of him being carried out by firefighters that still makes me tremble.

No one was telling Father Judge to run into that building. He knew where he was supposed to be.

Later that day, not many people know, America's biggest miracle happened in Lower Manhattan. NYC is an island, and the bridges and tunnels were all closed. About 500,000 people ended up trapped on Manhattan's water's edge with nowhere to go. The Coast Guard made a mayday plea for anyone with a boat to come help. The ferries came. Tugboats came. Fishing boats came. Party boats came. Even dinner cruise boats came.

In about nine hours, private American citizens had ferried roughly half a million people off the helpless island of Manhattan. It was the single biggest boat rescue in history. Bigger than Dunkirk.

They didn't do it because someone asked them. They did it because they saw smoke.

Jesus said it bluntly when he talked about love. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." What blows my mind about that sentence is he says it the night before he does it. Jesus isn't trying to give a sermon. He's literally telling his disciples what he's about to walk out into tomorrow.

Love walks toward the thing that everyone else is running from.

We won't see many mornings like that one, thank God. Most of us won't be carrying anybody down a smoke-choked stairwell. But we will all be given opportunities to walk toward something uncomfortable when it would be much easier to walk away. A friend calling your soul sick these days but drowning in pain. A marriage you stopped making time for. That phone call you've been avoiding for three weeks. That person at church we all avoid sitting next to.

Twenty-five years is long enough for a day like that to become nothing more than a day on the calendar. Those who lived it didn't know it was special. They just knew it started like any other Tuesday.

So today, let's remember those we lost. Pray for the families who still hurt on anniversaries. And ask God where he wants you to walk that you're currently trying to run from.

He isn't calling most of us to climb into a burning building. But will you have the love to walk toward it if he does?

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble."

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