Now it begins...

 

 

Hello! And welcome to my first blog!

 

I will endeavor to update my blog weekly with thoughts on living for Christ, life, sports, and thoughts and observations in general so I hope you will check back frequently and interact with me as these blogs are intended to be discussion starters and not enders. :-)

 

So let's begin...

 

What a day to create a first blog! The 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, PA on September 11, 2001.

 

As many of you are doing today I have reflected upon where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the news about the attacks. I was sitting in the Senior Pastor's office of the Snellville Church of God planning the day as we had a funeral to attend that afternoon and then to attend an Atlanta Braves baseball game that night with Gerald Hanley (a church member), Gene McGuire (the senior pastor), and Dallas Howard (the youth pastor).

 

A member (Carson Turner I believe) called and told the pastor that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and I quickly made my way to my office and went to www.foxnews.com and was taken aback as the events of that day unfolded. We made it to the funeral but as many other events that day the baseball game was cancelled as it should have been.

 

As I read through the various news websites, facebook posts, and tweets yesterday I came across a story about a note that a gentleman had written that said "84th floor, west office, 12 people stranded". It had been thrown out of a window and received by a gentleman on the street who took the note to an officer at the Federal Reserve Building who as he was about to radio the information the tower collapsed. That note was given to his family ten years later after DNA confirmed that the blood spots on the paper were indeed that of a husband and father and his wife also confirmed his handwriting.

 

The wife told her story of searching the hospitals and the city frantically trying to find her husband to no avail and then settling in her mind that maybe he did not suffer in his final moments. The note delivered to her confirmed her worst fears that her husband was trapped above the heat and flames and could have very well been alive as the tower collapsed.

 

As I read the story I began to realize that for those who may share the same scenario as me in that I did not have a relative or friend pass into eternity that day and once a year I will commemorate, remember, and honor those who died on that fateful day there are those for whom 9/11 is a daily reminder of their loss.

 

Husbands, wives, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers, grandsons, granddaughters, employees, friends, co-workers who will never make it home again. I thought of those who that day said "good-bye" for the final time unknowingly and now live daily with an unimaginable loss. My heart hurts for them and as a father of two of God's most precious children and the husband to the most wonderful wife ever I cannot imagine the loss I would feel even 11 years later if they were suddenly and tragically taken from me.

 

So on this 11th anniversary of those attacks as we remember that day I invite you to pause for a moment and to lift up in prayer to our Heavenly Father those for whom 9/11/2001 is not just an annual reminder of how evil Evil can really be and that He would wrap those great big arms of His love around those for whom 9/11 is a daily reminder of whom they have lost.

 

Noel