There will probably never be an end to the stories pulled from the rubble of 9-11 — stories of brave men who shouldered people in wheelchairs down a hundred flights of stairs, or ferrymen who swallowed smoke to sail crowds safely off the island, or a woman who kept her head and stayed on the line with the passengers aboard Flight 93 just before they hijacked their hijackers, crashed, and burned. There were the passengers themselves, like Todd Beamer, who grabbed a butter knife and boiling water in a coffee pot and said, “Let’s roll.”
I’ve been reading Lisa Beamer’s account of her husband’s life and death in Let’s Roll, and I am grateful for it, as I am grateful for the two-thousand other stories that were pieced from the wreckage after that day. They were told to help children like me understand that evil can wreck a nation, but also that brave hope can save a thousand lives.
It’s hard to tell how many lives Todd Beamer saved by giving up his own in a Pennsylvania field that day. But there is one person whose life he did more than spare. Her name was Morgan, and she was born on January 9th, 2002 — four months after Todd, her dad, died.
Lisa Beamer checked into the hospital that day without her husband to fill out paperwork or push her wheelchair. She wore a bracelet her husband had bought, but she felt his strong, silent absence painfully as she labored and gave birth alone. “I wondered if my body would even function properly and perform the way a birthing mother’s body must,”[i] she wrote.
A little girl cried out into the delivery room that day, and after the silence of death that had fallen over the Beamer family’s home, it must have sounded like a resounding song.
It was not the only one.
More than 45 women were left widowed and pregnant by 9-11. As the death toll from that day emptied this world of its souls, more than 45 new ones filled the empty arms of moms like Lisa. Forty-five little voices broke the silence of death with a new song — just as the cries of a baby rang into the deathly silence of Bethlehem. And before Mary gave birth, Zecheriah was told that even as he aged, he would be given a newborn son:
“And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.” ~ Luke 1:14
John was born with a man-sized purpose, to straighten the crooked path that King Jesus would tread. Yet even in his infancy, John was fulfilling this calling. Even in his birth, he was breaking the curse of death with life, preparing the way for another boy to be born. Before he would ever learn the words to say, I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus’s little voice was already chasing away all the haunting emptiness of death.
The world is still on fire, babies are still being born, and in this lies mercy.
I held my newest niece by the light of a window last January. Her eyes were clear and unsullied. She had not yet seen death, terrorism, or fire. Like Todd Beamer’s little girl, she will never remember the day the skies burned, but along with every baby born in the aftermath, her cry alone was the victory cry of life.
[i] Lisa Beamer with Ken Abraham, Let’s Roll: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage. (Tyndale: 2002), 292
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