9/11 & COVID-19

Yes, I remember where I was 19 years ago on this very day. I was sitting in my 5th Grade classroom. I was terrified because when I changed schools in the 3rd Grade, my new school had recently received a bomb threat. So I often worried that there would be another bomb threat. My teacher conferred with other teachers in the hallway before returning to the classroom, turning on The TODAY Show, and watching the news for the next while. The image of the towers falling is etched into my memory – and the fear I felt when they showed a picture of Osama Bin Laden is a feeling I will never forget.

One author once wrote, “Every age is an age of transition. To anticipate the future, one must understand the present, and to do that, it is necessary to examine the past. In so doing, however, we discover that the larger patterns of change are seldom clear, and that the most profound changes are usually so gradual and so subtle that people are neither aware of them nor fully appreciative of their significance until after the fact.”

September 11, 2001, was a day that truly changed the course of history. It was a major disruption in ways that no one could have foreseen. I grew up as a kid in the 90s during a time when I could still ride my bike up and down the streets, roam all over the neighborhood, and stay gone until it was dark outside without my mama having to worry. I knocked on a lot strangers' doors to sell band fruit and chorus cookie dough. It didn’t occur to me as a child that the world could be such a dangerous place. I miss the innocence of those days. I only wish the high school and college students that I have taught, who are mostly too young to remember 9/11 if they were born at all, could know what life was like in “those days” of not so long ago.

I think we are living in such a time as 9/11. We are surrounded by a gripping sense of death, fear, and uncertainty. It feels very much like a “wartime” with no visible enemy to defeat. (In fact, it seems that we have been, in many ways, creating enemies where there aren’t any just to have someone to blame and attack; but I will save that thought for another post.) The major difference between 9/11 and the current crisis is that this has not been a time of experiencing an attack at a particular moment and then dealing with the fallout or the aftermath. The pandemic has been unusually grueling, sort of like a constrictor that slowly suffocates its victim or a tsunami that slowly raises the water to levels that threaten the foundations of a community or a terminal illness that causes a slow decay. This has become a very long and drawn out season of struggle in many ways and there is no clear end in sight. Though I look forward to the days when the world will return to some sense of normalcy, whatever that means, I also think it is fair to acknowledge that this is a moment in history after which nothing will ever be exactly the same as it was before.

Yet I believe the legacy of 9/11 gives us hope for today. Even though we lament some of the things that we left behind in the world we knew before 9/11, we can see how God has given the grace to pick up the pieces and carry on. We will continue for as long as Jesus “tarries.” We will live as if He is coming tonight, but we will continue to work for Him as if He will not come again for another hundred years. God will give us the grace and strength to faithfully keep our hands to the plow, to get up every day and live for Him. The world looked a lot different after 9/11 and I think the world will look a lot different after COVID-19. Some of the changes may take a decade or more for us to process and embrace. But one thing will not chance, which is that the same God who was with us beforehand will be with us afterward. In a world of unpredictable change and inexplicable continuity, God is the constant who walks with us through every season. He gives the grace to grieve those people and those things that have been lost. He gives the grace to face each challenge without fear or worry and with confidence and trust.