beautiful burning world

I was downtown working at a health clinic the morning of September 11th. Working full time and going to college in the evenings and weekends, I was responsible for opening the clinic, turning on all the lights, taking the phone off call forwarding, making sure the lobby was ready for patients.

I flipped the waiting room TV on and walked back to my desk behind the sliding glass window to get charts and intake forms ready when I heard the breaking news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.

I laughed to myself thinking someone was gonna be in big trouble over that mistake.

I had no idea what I was watching.

A few minutes later, on live TV in a quiet, empty office with the smell of fresh brewed coffee hanging in the air, I watched the second plane hit the second tower.

The world and I were just beginning to understand what was happening.

Things were never, ever going to be the same, that morning was shifting our realities, our hearts, our brains.

September 11th altered the world we live in, the way we go about our day, the way we think about travel and planes and going to work.

Not that bad things hadn’t happened before. For many of us, especially my generation, this was our first taste of national tragedy. We didn’t understand wars on our land and people coming here to kill us like so many past generations, so many other places.

We had lived in a bubble that popped that Tuesday morning.

September 11th changed us, shifted our realities, gave us new perspectives on loving and hating.

I was 19 when the towers fell. In a lot of ways, it marked a growing up for me, a realization that unspeakable things happen and we have to figure out how to survive them, how to keep going in light of the new heartbreak.

I’ve been practicing that lesson a lot as an adult. You probably have too.
Someone betrays you: shock and change.
We lose someone too soon, too fast, too hard: mourn and shift.
A relationship ends: sadness and a different perspective.
The life we thought we were living was, in reality, a lie: shock and shift and shift and shift.

I didn’t understand that morning in the downtown clinic that this would happen again and again in my adult life: a calm morning and sudden afternoon heartbreak, an evening of quiet followed by a life-altering night.

I can still get mad about not seeing the hints or signs if I sit in that spot too long. Like I could have prevented death or heartache or ruined lives if I had just been paying closer attention.

We all tend to look back at the moment before the shift, before the betrayal or crash or devastation, pleading for it to be different. We feel sad for the person we were just before the moment happened. We feel envious of that time, that lightness we didn’t even know we were living in until it was taken away.

As the morning of September 11th progressed, people stayed out of downtown Indianapolis. The concept of flying planes into building was so unfathomable that the reaction to this was no one was safe in any tall building. So the nation shut down. Offices closed. People flocked to schools to get their kids. Airports emptied. The roads were clear and quiet by mid-afternoon.

When tragedy hits, we want our people and we want to be in a safe place. September 11th changed our definition of a safe place.

We closed the clinic early that afternoon; we were encouraged to get out of downtown as quickly as possible. My evening classes were cancelled. Everyone needed to be at home, everyone needed to be in front of their TVs hungry for information and hope.

A friend and I tried to go to three different blood banks to donate blood. What else could two Midwestern girls who feel helpless and shocked do? The news was calling for blood for NYC and we went. People were lined up out the doors, around the blocks of all the blood centers. They were turning people away.

I was relieved. I’ve never been able to have a blood draw without a few moments of is-she-going-to-pass-out-now? tension. But it felt selfish and greedy to not do it anyway; my fear of needles didn’t seem so important if there were people who jumped out of skyscrapers that morning to avoid being burned alive.

Even 18 years later, it seems confusing that it happened. I’m not sure if it will ever not be shocking to me that September 11th happened. It’s like my brain doesn’t have a clue what to do with that much pain and suffering.

Honestly, my brain doesn’t know what to do with a lot of the pain and suffering I’ve lived through: the sudden death of a friend, the betrayal in my marriage, the secrets people will hurt others to keep.

Internet memes and positive Instagram accounts want to tell you to let go and be free and stop letting the past hold you back, but those things are easier said than done. The idea that we can experience horror and heartbreak and death and not be forever changed by it is naive and wrong.

We keep going, yes. But we are different because of it.
Jesus can heal and redeem situations, yes. But we will continue to live in the aftermath of the hurt.

September 11th changed us, shifted our realities, gave us new perspectives on loving and hating.

I wish I could tell you that day was the only time I felt the ground move under my feet, the reality of the world too broken to handle. But it’s not. It’s happened again and again.

But we keep going.

We had to get up on September 12th and figure out how to keep living. We had to find the hurting people and support them. We had to clean up the mess others had created. We had to honor and love the people we lost. We couldn’t all stay home where it felt safer, we had to open our doors and walk tentatively back out them to see what was left.

If right now you’re living in the aftermath of death or destruction, that’s what you have to do too. You take your broken, shocked, shifted heart to the front door. You touch the cold metal door handle and you slowly open the door again. It’s heavier than you remember–everything is heavier than you remember–but you do it anyway. You can’t quit. You can’t stay inside even though you really want to. It hurts outside, but it hurts inside too.

Then you walk out into the beautiful burning world and you figure out how to live again.

It is going to be different, but it can still be good.