I used to go to church with a lady who got teary-eyed on September 11th, remembering how her husband could have easily flown as a pilot for United that day in 2001. As the Lord would have it, her husband wasn’t working that morning, but Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania was a plane he had piloted before. More than most people, they seemed grateful for life on that day, as they’d felt what it might have been like to slip through their fingers.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” she told me.
Ask anyone, they will remember where they were when the towers burned and fell. Usually, you don’t even have to ask. People will tell you as if it happened this morning. They were commuting to work, washing breakfast dishes, babysitting their niece, in a meeting for something they can no longer remember.
“I was changing your diaper,” Mom reminds me whenever September 11th rolls around. I was 7 months old.
Amazing, isn’t it, how the ordinary tasks we do every day can be branded onto our memories when something momentous happens? I can’t even remember what I did yesterday morning, but I know Jared and I were settling him into his new church office the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated. It was our first Wednesday night with our new congregation.
“We’ll always remember where we were,” Jared said.
And I thought about that. The question itself – Where were you? – reveals our utter rootedness to place. When something happens in New York, or Washington, or Utah, we feel it as if we were there, even as we feel more tethered than ever to where we are.
September 11th this year found me in the kitchen most of the morning, making homemade refried beans for a family from church. Jared and I took our car to the farmer’s co-op for an oil change. I cleaned the house and turned dough for pizzas. We were wading into our first week at the new church where Jared will be pastoring, and there was much good work to do. But in the smoke haze of a national tragedy, the tasks at hand suddenly seemed silly and pointless—like playing the triangle in a band on the sinking Titanic. Tragedy was unfolding there, but I was still very much here.
This is the tug-and-pull of life, is it not?
And yet this is how God created us—as humans with only two feet in one place. The internet might give us the notion that we can be everywhere and know everything, but only Yahweh God can be in heaven and Sheol and the uttermost depths of the sea all at once. Only He can be in Utah, Washington, and my kitchen on Thursday morning.
As I stirred refried beans and rolled burritos, I wondered if the subsequent question to “Where were you the day it happened?” is “Where are you now?” Where do you find yourself in space and time? Where has Providence set you down like a little child in a house that seems to be on fire? What has He given you to do there?
9/11 changed the landscape of life in the U.S. The events of last week were like a tectonic plate beneath the sea that sent all the waters tumbling inland. And while I may be states away from the event, I can feel the shockwaves just standing in my kitchen. I am where I am, yet even this place looks different.
There is a war on the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you and I have to determine where our battleground will be. For Christians like Charlie Kirk, it might be a political platform with thousands of listeners to whom he proclaimed the truth of Christ. For others, it might be our home, our neighborhood, our workplace, our local church that’s hungry to know how biblical truth meets the lies of the world.
“Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”
– 1 Tim. 6:12
Again, the question faces us: Where are you now? What has He given you to do?
Has he given you a diaper to change? Then change it. Refried beans to make? Then make them. A church to return to? Then by all means, keep returning, and returning, and returning again to the place you were, and are, and are bringing His kingdom come.
To borrow Elisabeth Elliot’s well-worn words, simply “do the next thing.”
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