REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11th

I do not have the clear concise memories of that day Five years ago. I believe they are locked away in a Journal written on that day. I think this is because of the shock that I felt as I watched events occurring live on my television set. I do remember thinking, not again as the realization came that for the second time in my lifetime, my country was being attacked. The first time the news came over the radio, but this time there it was, unfolding before my very eyes, the death & destruction occurring in both New York & in our nations capital at the Pentagon.

I may have received a phone call to turn on my TV, possibly from my daughter, or I may have just turned it on, but I watched in stunned & shocked horror as the images flashed upon the screen, my mind not wanting to accept what I was seeing as being real.

For days I watched different programs & prayed that some of those unaccounted for whose pictures were displayed by friends & relatives who were hoping against hope that their loved one had somehow escaped. I rejoiced when someone was interviewed who through a set of circumstances, (God's intervention) had not been in one of the Towers & escaped death. The stories were all illustrations of that, missed planes, & in one instance a pair of broken eyeglasses kept a man from being with coworkers at the restaurant on the top floor of one of the towers.

I thought too of the trip my daughter had taken a few years before to New York during Fleet Week when my son-in-law was in the Navy & had been in those very towers
Now in addition to the loss of life which of course was the most important factor in this horrendous event, a beautiful landmark was no more, never to be visited by those coming to New York.

At one point the networks stopped playing the horiffic scene of the burning buildings & them eventually crashing to the ground, but not before they were forevever etched in our minds. For a brief time patriotism was in effect,& people turned to God looking for answers. Politics seemed temporarily forgotten, as a nation tried to bond together to somehow heal, even as we did during the long war in WW2 when the first attack occurred in the remote part of our nation in Hawaii.

The one thing that I hope everyone will be aware of is this "God is in control" He loves & cares for each one of us. I heard in a sermon yesterday,that the Lord deliberately waited on shore while the disciples struggled for hours in huge waves far from the shore, & came to them in the wee hours of the morning. When they saw him coming towards them walking on the water, they were really petrified with fear.
What they did not know was that the Lord spent that time in prayer for them. God is in control, of our lives, of our families, of our nation, of our world, & if we could just learn to rest in Him, what occurs in our lives is in His hands.