September 11, 2001 dawned with a brilliant sun sparkling against a deep azure sky.  Before the morning was over, the sun and sky had been obscured by billowing clouds of nasty gray dust and debris.  America had been attacked, and we would never be the same again.

When news of the attacks came, I could scarcely believe it could be true.  Life in our suburban New York community seemed normal at the time.  But normalcy as we once knew it was rapidly slipping away. 

In the face of disaster and the fear of more disaster to come, I struggled with conflicting inner compulsions.  Part of me wanted to help.  The other part of me wanted to escape.  I prepared myself to do both.  Our local hospital called, asking me to offer counsel to some of their patients who had family members in the NYFD.  Weeks later I would be given the opportunity of ministering to small business owners in lower Manhattan.  By the way, the sky still rained ashes in that vicinity well into November.

As horrific as the events at Ground Zero were, it was the fear stoked by wild flying rumors that concerned me.  Bridges connecting Long Island to the mainland were being targeted by truck bombers, we heard.  Some 8 million of us on America’s most heavily populated island would be sitting ducks for chemical warfare.  We slept nervously that night.

The days that followed were eerily silent.  New York is typically loud.  Horns are always blaring.  People in the stores are always chattering.  But not now.  It was as if every traffic flow was a funeral procession and every store was a mausoleum.  Indeed dozens of funeral processions did take place.  The community in which we lived lost about 30 firefighters.   It was a time to mourn.  That’s why it was so hard to celebrate when Laura’s birthday on the 14^th.  We were still grief stricken.  It was a time to mourn, not a time to celebrate.  But a seven year old doesn’t understand that.  So we celebrated.

9/11 was intense in so many ways.  Among them were the conflicting duties and desires of my heart.  Every duty and every desire was intense—the sense of duty to plunge into the fray and help alongside the desire to escape…the duty to celebrate when the only thing I desired to do was mourn.

But is this not what life is about?  Life is filled with crises and terror of varying degrees.  At the same time life provides us with opportunities to celebrate.  Sometimes those occasions intersect.  Such is life.  And such is the gospel.  When we observe communion we gather to mourn and to celebrate.  We mourn over the death of Christ and over our sin which made His death necessary.  But we celebrate what His death and His resurrection bring to us—the way of escape from certain doom and from the fears that accompany it.  This truly is a time to remember.