On one of the most harrowing days in our nation’s recent history, it takes courage to remember. And I don’t always like remembering.
It’s not all bad, of course. I don’t mind rehashing old schemes with good friends or recalling the early years of finding my sea legs after jumping into the ocean of marriage. Those magic moments when new life with my last name was placed in my arms, I’ll remember that until the tears come.
But days like today, 9/11, I’d rather not.
As the morning inches forward, the news feeds fill with old images. The urge is real – scroll faster, look away. I don’t want to see that anguish again. I don’t really care to remember that ugly, that fear, that heartbreak.
Maybe you don’t either?
It seems a privilege to even have that option. Thousands of miles from the epicenter, my memories are distanced, televised. I didn’t taste the grief like so many others did and yet my memories of that day are seared just as yours are.
You don’t forget a day like that, a time like that.
Last year I taught a small class of children modern history and the topic of September 11 came up. I felt a lump rise in my throat. It is easier to teach the things we are detached from, the ancient history we don’t feel. These children had questions about events and particulars, questions about why. I navigated their interrogation as gracefully as I could on the spot.
How do you gracefully tell a child that evil is real? That death and pain and bad things really do happen?
But in our brief conversation what surprised me most was how much I didn’t remember.
Let’s see, yes, there was another plane in a Pennsylvania field and one headed for the Pentagon…wait did that one actually arrive there? Yes, yes it crashed there but I’m not entirely sure if there were any survivors on board
The kids sat rapt, learning some of the horrid details, wrapped around names and places that were familiar to them, for the very first time.
And I wondered, how am I already forgetting some of these details? It hasn’t even been 20 years and the memories feel a little dusty, they come back a little more slowly.
This morning I was reading Psalm 78. My Bible titles it God’s Kindness to Rebellious Israel. I might title it A History of God’s Goodness and Israel’s Inability to Remember.
“Marvelous things He did in the sight of their fathers, in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan, He divided the sea and caused them to pass through; and He made the waters stand up like a heap. In the daytime also He led them with the cloud, and all the night with a light of fire. He split the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink in abundance like the depths.”
So much provision. Chapters of the Exodus summed up. Hard and long lived years. All in a few verses. God provided wildly.
And yet another theme is present, peppered through this chapter:
- They did not keep the covenant. (verse 10)
- They forgot His works and wonders (verse 11)
- In spite of this they still did not believe (verse 32)
- They did not remember His power. (verse 42)
How does this happen? How do you walk out of captivity with plunder, watch the sea be piled in a heap for your passage, be fed miraculously at your complaint….and forget it all in a few short years?
When we don’t remember, we choose forget.
Our Bibles are woven with this reminder. The stories, the remembering, is sprinkled throughout both the Old Testament and New. Yes, there were hard times, but He always provided. He is always faithful. Remember.
Our circumstances are not all that different. Neither is our God. He is providing here, in and amidst the hard. The quieter, side stories of September 11, 2001 tell of His provision in big and bold ways. I don’t want to look away, scroll faster, forget that.
“…they should make them known to their children; that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare to their children, that they may set their hope in God and not forget the works of our God.”
This is our job, friend. Let’s not look away. Let’s remember. And pass it on, bravely, that our children may set their hope in God.
