I wasn’t around for Pearl Harbor and when Kennedy was shot, I was a kindergarten kid. The teacher called us together and told us that the president had been killed. Oh, I thought, can we go to recess now? I remember when Reagan was shot and while that was quite a morning the fact that he survived meant the trauma of that day did not quite rise to the level of the others. For me, the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series ranks up there, but others will simply see that as crass and inappropriate. (And it is!)
But I will never forget September 11, 2001. Never. I was waiting for a group of preachers to arrive at my home for a weekly pastors meeting we had. I flipped on the TV as I waited and the moment I did, a plane flew into a building – wasn’t it around 8:02 (Central)? It was the second plane. The first plane had hit a few minutes before and people were wondering what was going on, but when the second plane hit it removed all doubt. We were under attack. Life has not been the same since. That day let us know that this terrorism fight was not something that was going to take place on foreign shores, like all the other wars of my lifetime. They were going to bring the horror to us.
Denny Burk tweeted something amazing this morning. The freshmen at Boyce College that he teaches were 4 or 5 years old at the time of the attacks. They barely remember the day. Can you believe it? Kids in college who were the age I was when Kennedy was shot! It’s been 14 years.
- So, what were you doing?
- How has this changed you?
- How did 9/11 change America – really? After the initial “God bless America” and “we’re all in this together” phase, how are we different?
The floor is yours.
I was at the McDonald’s in Wake Forest, NC with a couple classmates after our morning class at SEBTS. We were driving back to campus when another pastor friend called and gave us the news. As we entered chapel, Dr. Patterson gave us more details and led everyone in prayer. Afterwards, I watched news coverage in the library between classes.
I was at work, serving as a product engineer at the time. Myself and the others in my group were listening to the radio as we worked (G Gordon Liddy’s show at the time), when he noticed the news feeds from New York on his equipment and started reporting the activities going on. It made for a silent morning for us as the events unraveled.
I was sitting in the living room in Sapporo, Japan with my wife at night (time zone differences). It was a strange feeling to be separated from the USA during the days that followed.
I was in my home getting ready to go to the office. My wife told me what happened. I was watching when the second plane hit. I thought it was a replay of the first.
I was pastoring a church on USM’s campus. We had a prayer service that evening for international students. They were terrified people would hate them because of what happened. We had a large contingency from several nations come to our service for no other reason to show opposition to the terrotist act.
The only other event close to this magnitude in my lifetime was the explosion of the first space shuttle.
I was at work when it happened. Lots of confusion at first. I was kind of in the minority in the aftermath because I really felt like the administration took advantage of the situation to push past a lot of invasive and restrictive laws that never would have seen the light of day in saner moments. And of course the long term aftermath that I see is a deep distrust of anyone with dark skin and a beard.
We had an IMB journeyman speak at our church a few weeks ago about her work among a muslim people group in Eastern Europe. During the Q/A, the tone was set right at the first question. The questioner just couldn’t believe she ever felt safe with so many Muslims around. When she responded that they were the most generous and hospitable people, there was silence.
Today a crane collapse killed at least 80 at a mosque in Mecca. I couldn’t help wondering if Christian’s first response was to pray or to cheer.
I was getting ready for work, wondering if I could even begin to answer the questions of third graders whose experience in life could never have prepared them for this horror.
There is no way to explain that certain people from extremist religions have done such evil in the name of God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOjNe80fdw
I was at the church office where I was a youth minister. The pastor was recovering from a minor stroke the weekend before, so he wasn’t there. Dad called and said “turn on the TV…”
I saw the first tower smoking….and then had to deal with the angry church member who wanted to come tell the pastor to either resign or he’d have him fired at the next business meeting. (And that he would have me elected as pastor….yeah, that was its own bad mess.)
About the time the second tower was hit, the pastor called to give the secretary some work to do. I asked if he wanted me to do anything like open the church for prayer, and he said not to “bother with it” since prayer meeting was the next night anyway. After another hour, I went home. Hugged my wife, watched my 4 month-old play, and we prayed for her parents (they were IMB in the Middle East at the time).
I remember thinking that this was the future that we knew, in the 90s, to be worried about. Terrorism, killers who strike and disappear, and wondering how this would change the playing field for the world around us. That’s about it.
This and the Challenger Disaster are the two things that fall on my “I remember when…” I was alive when Reagan was shot, when Elvis died, when John Lennon was murdered, but none of those really sank in.
I arrived at my work just after the first plane struck. We have far flung parking lots, so I took a shuttle bus over to my office building. Interestingly enough, several people on the bus were already throwing out the name “bin Laden”. Once in my office, somebody wheeled out a television from a conference room and we sat dumbfounded as the second plane crashed on national TV. I remember the Today show hosts were speechless when they saw it go in. Not a lot of work when on that whole morning. I support IT for a large travel company, so you can expect that the next week was interesting. We supply group travel events for clients, so we have an operations center that is constantly watching for weather and other disasters, so they were busy trying to get people home.
I think we lost a lot in the subsequent days. The desire for security at the expense of individual freedom is at the top of the list. For Christians, quite frankly I think we have come to fear some of our mission field.
I have a great friend who is a former Palestinian Muslim (came to Christ around 10-15 years ago) who is working with our Adult bible teachers to super charge our Sunday bible fellowships into being more about transformation than simply content. I was telling my SBC mother about him and how he has been a blessing to me and my family. She looked at me weird and kind of mumbled “He isn’t teaching any of that Muslim stuff is he?”
Some of that comment comes from my mother completely losing her filter as she has grown older. But I know some of that comes from a mindset that views all Muslims with deep suspicion. I also see it in the response of some fellow Christians to our church ministry to Muslim refugees.
To me, that is the biggest thing we have lost.
I was at a state convention meeting in Salt Lake City, UT. (I live in Twin Falls, ID)
After learning that the majority of those involved where from Saudi Arabia, I began praying for the Saudi people (praying for your enemy…) I later joined a world wide prayer advacy network and still to this day engaged in speaking the gospel to Saudi people. (Saudi Advacy Network)
After the initial days of appearing to unite the nation and the church, we far too quickly returned to “normal”. Today, look – 14 years later – the church is as apathetic as ever and the nation as wicked as ever. It was a short lived clance toward God. I think mostly, that when people who began looking for truth looked to most churches and rather than finding a place holding forth truth they found a place more interested in entertaining herself or appealing to the unconverted with worldly methods found that the church (generally speaking) was no different than anything they had already been participating in.
The church (generally speaking) was not prepared to be much of a lasting help as people were searching for answers about God.
I should better say not all professing to be “the church” was ready. Some were… and did.
From what I am able to piece together, it looks like I and my family were in the air in between Amsterdam and Madrid, on the second leg of a transatlantic flight when it all happened. We were on our way back to our mission post in Spain after a summer-long Stateside assignment. When we arrived in Madrid, still unaware of what had happened, I noticed the extra security but thought nothing of it as I supposed a visiting dignitary was in town or something like that. We then drove another 3 hours to our home in Mérida. By that time, it was fairly late at night in Spain, and we were tired from the journey. When I opened the door to our apartment, I found a note from our missionary coworker saying to call home immediately, no matter what time we got in. I still didn’t know what had happened, But I called home and found out from my parents the initial bits and pieces.
I got the rest of my initial info, after thst, from the Spanish media.
Interestingly, at first, everyone in Spain was quite supportive and eager to give condolences to us as Americans. Within several months, with Bush threatening to attack Iraq, the whole atmosphere changed dramatically. I still remember like it was yesterday our 12-year-old son coming home from his Spanish public school saying his teacher had written on the board “Bush = Hitler.”
These are some of the types of things missionaries sometimes go through.
I think you are the first person I’ve ever known who was in the air when it happened.
I was teaching in a public middle school – less than 20 minutes from Ft. Campbell, KY. It was 2nd Period, and I had a room full of 7th graders. One of the teachers came running down the hallways, screaming, “Turn on your televisions!” So, We turn on our TVs and watched in horror.
Finally, one of my students raised his hand. I called on him. He turned to face me, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and said, “Mrs. _____, I have an aunt and uncle who live in New York …. Not very far from the towers.” ( A few days later, we did find out that his family was OK.)
Teachers and faculty members are not allowed to lead prayer in public schools, but our principal dismissed classes by grade level for a short “recess”. Each grade gathered around the flag for student-led prayer. We continued to do that once per week for the remainder of the school year.
I worked with a team of five 7th grade teachers. 4 of us were soldiers’ wives. The fifth was a soldier’s daughter.
I was driving back to Montana from Florida where I had been off shore fishing with five friends. I was in New Mexico when the news came on the radio.
BTW I was in college when President Kennedy was shot. I was watching TV waiting to go to work.
In China – where we were language students (with a purpose 😉 I was checking email before bed, and noticed an alert about a plane hitting the first tower. Watched the second tower being hit on a live feed, then got a phone call from a friend in the U.S. about the Pentagon. Couldn’t get ahold of my husband because the prayer group he was in didn’t carry phones for fear of being tracked. Once he arrived home, we watched it all on TV all night long, since CCTV live- streamed a hacked English CNN feed (never saw that before or since).
Our university had a large Muslim population; friends and neighbors checked on us frequently in the days to come, asking if our families and friends in the U.S. were safe, and lamenting that these evils had been done by Islamic terrorists, since it was their intent to live peacefully. It was a strange time to be overseas, to know that some locals viewed us with suspicion, while our U.S. families considered us unsafe, to mourn for our homeland but be far away, knowing we couldn’t return if we wanted or needed, since all incoming air traffic was stopped temporarily. We were unsure if we could make our planned trip to the U.S. In October; we did, but WOW, talking to the U.S. church that month about our ministry among Muslims, asking them to pray for our work, was … uncomfortable … .
My wife and I were at an outdoor swap meet looking for vintage hunting and fishing items (I’m a collector of those). One of the vendors had his radio on and we heard the breaking news about the attack. We hurried home and turned the TV on just in time to see the second plane hit. Truly a life-changing moment as we pondered the significance of this horrible event to America and how this might fit in God’s timetable for the Church and nation. We prayed.
9/11: Sitting where I am now, watching it all on the Today Show. A house guest was also here, from Germany, who was supposed to fly home that evening.
JFK: Sitting at my desk on the 7th floor of Indiana Insurance Company, working, talking to Ed Black on the phone. He told me his secretary told him JFK had been shot and he guessed he’d give everybody a day off (he was somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun). He hung up and Peg called immediately, confirming it.
Office was closed the next day, as it was declared a holiday, but I went to work anyway. As a friend there remarked, he was tired of watching “Western reruns”.
When Ruby shot Oswald, I was painting in my Aunt’s living room and saw the whole thing on TV.
We were at home on STAS on 911. Watched on TV. For some reason that morning I had put on a Pentagon t-shirt that I had from my time stationed there. We watched everything in horror and later that day I went out to buy some things and noticed people looking at me and some came up and asked about by shirt which I had forgotten I was wearing. They all asked if I had friends there that day, which I did, and said they were praying for them. It changed my life in other ways too since I was called out of retirement and back on active duty for a year to serve in DC. That caused me to be reassigned to a different job with the IMB when I returned also.
David Rogers is correct. We had the world’s support and sympathy after 911 and they understood us going into Afghanistan. We lost all that when we went into Iraq for the reasons we did. We have not recovered that trust to this day.
I was around, when they bombed Pearl Harbor, but I did not know about it due to the fact that I was to turn one year old on Dec. 30. And I must add that Dec. 7,1957 would become my spiritual birthday, while my Grand daughter was born on Dec., 2000 (for which I wrote a devotional for a devotional pamphlet for the FBC of Stanley, NC. Also one of favorite Aunts died on that date of Dec. 7, 1998. As to Sept.11, 2001, I was setting in the living room of the house trailer we were renting at the time. When the buidlings collapsed, I fell on my knees and asked God to have mercy on the poor souls in them.