9.11.01 remembered

I was 15 on 9/11/01.  The charter school I attended allowed me to enroll in a college course that semester, so I was at home waiting on my mom to take me to my 9:00am class.  She was watching the Today show when the planes hit.  At first she was incredulous.  Surely this was some terrible kind of accident.  Then the second plane hit- definitely NOT an accident.  I didn’t have much of a reaction but my mother was glued to the TV set and watched in horror as the towers fell.  We saw the chaos, the people jumping, it was terrible.  But the news was always showing something terrible.  For some reason I was struck by the amount of paperwork floating around New York like bits of confetti. So much paperwork!!! I hope they have everything backed up on the computers....All those man-hours wasted. How in the world would those documents ever end up back in the right office?   And who knew what kind of important and confidential information was now lose? It was a disaster allright- how where those buisnesses ever going to recover.  (I promise I'm not a robot!  The human tragedy took a while to sink in and didn't really hit me until I saw the makeshift memorials in the weeks afterwards.) 

I went to class, then back to my high school, where one frazzled parent after another was pulling their child out of class.  Each one had a different understanding of what was taking place.  Each one left it up to the teachers to calm down a room full of remaining students.  Their silent message became louder and louder and for the first time ever we heard them saying: We (adults) are not in control.  We don’t know what to do.  We are scared.  

My parents were not coming to get me, of this I was sure. My mother simply doesn’t “do” panic and there was no way she would just leave her job in the middle of the day.  By keeping me at school, I heard her saying, in her own way: Things aren’t that bad.  You can take care of yourself.  Stay the course. 

In the days and weeks to follow everyone had a different opinion about why this happened, what we should do, and who would be next.  In a great show of narcissism, everyone assumed their city, and their child were the most obvious targets.  Wichita Falls is home to Sheppard Air Force Base, which trains NATO pilots.  There was plenty of speculation about attacks on "us".  Were terrorists really sitting around in the dessert plotting to take down a dusty little town of 100,000 people?  I don't think so.

9/11 taught me that panic is a choice.  It’s contagious.  If we choose to panic, the terrorists win.  Being in Houston, we see this a lot during hurricane season, too.  Just because everyone else around you is running around crazy doesn’t mean you have to.  Safety and control are just illusions. No matter what happens, we can choose our reaction, and we can choose to put our faith in God.  Ultimately He is in control of everything anyway.