Here’s a less-than-encouraging thought to begin your day: on average, 174,349 people will die today, including 8,150 Americans. Recent examples range from the Amazon plane crash in Miami that killed five to the Nepal flash floods that killed at least 1,300, with some 5,000 missing. Humans are threatened these days by volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and floods.

But we know that airplanes sometimes crash and natural disasters sometimes occur. What we don’t expect is to go to work in the morning and never come home because people espousing an ideology we’ve never heard of decide that they should hijack airplanes and use them to kill us.

When you think of 9/11, what comes to mind first? For me, it was watching the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapse live on television. Prior to that moment, we held out hope that those inside the flaming buildings could somehow evacuate safely. Then the North Tower followed and all such hope was gone.

Images are seared into our memories of people jumping to their deaths to escape being burned alive. As are the ash-covered faces of shocked bystanders on the ground. And courageous firefighters, NYPD officers, and medics who ran into the buildings as everyone else ran away, hundreds of whom died as they tried to save others.

We will be glad when Friday is done

I will write articles about 9/11 this week and you will perhaps read them and others like them; not because we want to, but because we feel compelled to. To ignore the day feels wrong, a betrayal of those who died on that horrible morning and all those who still grieve their loss today. To remember the day along with millions of other Americans is to feel a solidarity in suffering that somehow feels sustaining.

But we will all be glad when Friday comes and goes. We worry about further attacks by those who still hate us and want to terrorize us. And we know that, unlike any other war in our history, the “War on Terror” will not be over until there are no more terrorists.

The Germans and Japanese stopped fighting us after World War II even though many in their countries undoubtedly still believed in the causes that prompted them to go to war. But they had no way to attack us after their governments surrendered to us.

Before 9/11, wars began and eventually ended. By contrast, jihadists can turn anyone who can wear a bomb into a suicide bomber and use them to attack Americans wherever in the world they find us. They can stage cyberattacks on our water systems and power grids. If they were to gain biological or nuclear weapons, they would undoubtedly use them against us as well.

So to remember 9/11 is to remember all the innocent Americans who died, and to admit that another 9/11 could be in our future. This time, it could be us. And we feel no agency by which to change the minds of jihadists who want to kill us, no sense that there is a strategy that will liberate us from their hatred of us.

Accordingly, it feels easier to remember 9/11 only as much as we feel we must to pay our respects to those who died, then go on with our lives in intentional ignorance of the peril the day illustrates.

But there’s a better way.

“I’m closer to where I should have been”

1. S. Lewis observed that Satan wants us either to fear him more than we should or to ignore his existence. Terrorists hope for the same: they terrorize us by the threat of terror, or they use our complacency to stage their attacks.

In response, Christians embrace three circular facts that secular people do not:

1. This is a fallen world filled with fallen people, so we should expect to encounter sin and suffering. This leads us to #2:
2. The best way to prepare for an uncertain future is to place our faith in a certain God. This leads us to #3:
3. The closer we are to God today, the more ready we are for whatever comes tomorrow. This prepares us for #1.

I spoke last Sunday to a friend whose wife is battling a debilitating illness. When I expressed my sorrow over her suffering, he told me that she would rather have her pain and the depth of intimacy it has produced with the Lord than to lose her illness and go back to the way she was with God.

Tim Keller said the same after his terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer: “I’m closer to where I should have been most of my life.” He noted that most people “live as if they’re never going to die” and realized that he had been in their number. His diagnosis caused Tim and his wife to seek the Lord’s strength and peace in such a way that they “would never want to go back to the kind of prayer life and spiritual life we had before the cancer. Never.”

One way God would redeem the shock and horror rekindled by Friday’s anniversary is by using them to demonstrate our mortality and thus to draw us to himself. So, let’s use this somber week to respond to our Father’s invitation: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Let’s not wait until tragedy strikes to draw closer to the One who will sustain us when it does. As we do, we will be able to say with David, “I sought the Lᴏʀᴅ, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears” (Psalm 34:4).

A church sign I passed recently said, “You make the choice. God makes the change.”

What “choice” will you make today?

Quote for the day:

“Real faith is man’s weakness leaning on God’s strength.” —Dwight L. Moody

Our latest website resources:

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• Remembering 9/11: A pastor’s family on faith amid tragedy

 

 

Denison Forum