Always Remember

It was my senior year of high school. I was sitting in art class at Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville, MD when I got called down to the guidance office to go over my college applications. I remember walking in to sit down when I overheard the secretary telling the councelor "someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center in New York city!" My little 17-year-old naive self had no clue the severity of the situation. I never got my meeting that day. All hell broke loose. They let us go home early so everyone rushed to their cars like crazy people, because no one knew what was going on. Jenny, my carpoolee, was waiting for me at my car and cluelessly we started to drive home.
The beltway was bumper-to-bumper traffic. We couldn't get through to anyone on our cell phones. Looking around at everyone in their cars, you could see panic on their faces. We lived 4 hours from New York. I'm not sure what we were expecting to happen. A nuclear bomb to drop out of the sky perhaps. Or an attack on the World Trade Center in Baltimore, just minutes away.
I dropped Jenny off and rushed home. I was the first to get home that day. I waited anxiously for someone else to come home. My mom was a teacher and she got to come home early too, so she arrived shortly after I did. My dad was still at work and my brothers were both older and no longer living at home. My mom and I turned on the news and watched the horror. I'll never forget the images I saw that day. Men and women running in the streets of New York. The sky was filled with smoke and ashes were falling like demonic snowflakes.
Those images are burned into my brain.
For days and weeks to come, we heard stories and saw videos and pictures of the events that happened on September 11th, 2001. So many people lost their lives; families were ripped apart. I thank God for the bravery of the firefighters, police officers, and military who risked and sacrificed their lives to rescue others from the rubble that was once the Twin Towers. And for the men and women who decided to join the military to fight back. America was attacked that day, and we are still fighting back in honor of whom and what was taken from us.
Some day my kids will read about September 11th in their history books. They'll ask me about it and I'm sure I will still remember every detail of that day.
I'm so proud to be an American and proud that I can raise my children in this country, the land of the free. And no one can EVER take that from us.






And I'll leave you with this picture I saw today. It was taken at a 9/11 memorial. Notice the cross.

Acts 2:25-27
David said about him: "I saw the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay...