Keep your memory bright before God.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

This morning as I awakened to another smoke-filled sky from uncontained wildfires both north and south of where we live, I thought of my alarm clock in the early morning of September 11, 2001. The voice of one of my favorite Bay Area talk show hosts was saying a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. His voice had a kind of puzzled alarm.

We did not know, of course, that our country and indeed much of the world would convulse in the days, weeks, months, years ahead. We could not have known how intensely our country would be altered by terrorism – in pervasive security measures, in the horrors of war – including the war on Christians.

Now, 19 years later, I find again the memorial services, the reading of the names of the lost, the tolling of the bells, the recounting of heroic deeds, the photos, to be both so precious and so valuable. We remember flags everywhere, how much we prayed for those toiling for months in the wrack and ruin, slowly, painfully recovering the dead. We remember how we prayed for the thousands of families and friends of the lost – for comfort in their unimaginable grief.

It struck me today that this retrospective each year is a mirror, reflecting the true heart of our country. The response to 9/11 revealed how every impediment to sacrifice, to love of this great country was torn away.

I believe those things remain at the heart of who we are as citizens of the United States.

What we see now on the news, the rending and tearing, are not the heart of most Americans. This year’s remembrance of the collapse of the towers and the countless heroic deeds comes at a time when we need to see ourselves reflected as good and decent people, a great many of us prayerful disciples of Christ. We do have it within us, with God’s gracious hand, to persevere, to raise our families to appreciate yet again the high cost that has been paid to rescue, rebuild, and exact a high price from those who would do us harm.

And to vow keep the memory bright – and never forget.