9/11 reaction 20 years later

I'm not sure why, but the anniversary of 9/11/2001 is hitting me harder than it ever has. I've never been emotional about it before today.

Maybe that's because I was close to things in DC as they were happening, or because of the recent unwinding of our response in Afghanistan, or because I'm thinking about things from that day I had never heard before, or because there are new pressures on our freedoms two decades later.

Last night, ABC World News Tonight included someone mentioning that the Flight 93 passengers intentionally timed their response to make sure their aircraft was over a rural area. That says so much about what they intended to do and what knew might happen. ABC News also played the voicemail of Flight Attendant CeeCee Ross Lyles whose voice eventually breaks when she talks about how she hopes she gets to see her three children again.

Remembering John Bunyan

John Bunyan would not have been socially desirable in his time. He, a Bedford tinker, couldn’t get inside one of the princely castles. 

I was very much amused when I was overseas. They had erected a monument to John Bunyan, and it was unveiled by lords, dukes, and other great men. 

Bears prayer

Ditka called his team in for a prayer. 

Football coaches lead their men in prayer for the same reason God is on the mind of army grunts: because no one knows when the hammer will strike steel. 

A great player in his own era, a hell-raiser and late-night carouser, Ditka found religion in Dallas, under the tutelage of Cowboys coach Tom Landry. 

Echo taps

Patriotism filled the air of New Concord, the small eastern Ohio town where I grew up.

Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Armistice Day were flag-waving holidays of parades and salutes to the United States and to the soldiers, living and dead, who had fought for freedom and democracy.

My father was one of those soldiers. He served in France during World War I, delivering artillery shells to the front on trucks and horse-drawn caissons, and he came home partially deaf from a cannon blast but otherwise unharmed.

He also was a bugler. He blew the bugle for reveille and taps, for mail call and mess call, and when the flag was raised.

At home, on those patriotic days that I remember, Dad was again called upon to play the bugle. He marched in the parade formations when the local veterans from the Thirty-seventh Ohio Division marched down Main Street on Armistice Day, and played the colors when they raised the flag at the American Legion hall at the end of the parade.

But the bugling I remember best was the taps he played on Memorial Day.

A house that is immortal

Moody once said, “Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all—out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal; a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body fashioned like unto His glorious body. I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever.”

Source: The Overcoming Life by Dwight Lyman Moody

Aiming to be a man fully consecrated to Him

D. L. Moody was not an ordained minister, but was an effective evangelist. 

He was once told by Henry Varley, a British evangelist, “Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man fully consecrated to Him.” 

Moody later said, “By God’s help, I aim to be that man.” 

A glorious future

Some think that on the first day we’re converted we’ve got everything. To be sure, we get salvation for the past and peace for the present. 

But then there’s still the glory for the future in store. 

That’s what kept Paul rejoicing. He considered his afflictions, his stripes, and his stonings as nothing, compared to the glory that was to come. He considered those things nothing, so that he could win Christ.