It was a crisp blue day that all of us remember, an ordinary school day in early September, that we will never forget. I had just returned from a six-mile run, the first time that I ever wondered about possibly running a marathon someday. I ran early as soon as the girls left for school. And then, I hunkered down to get some editing and writing done. The phone rang. It was my mother. “Where’s Bill?” she asked frantically. “In Des Moines on business,” I said. “Why?”
“Just turn on your television!” And with that, she hung up the phone.
Eleven years ago. 9/11. It was an ordinary school day that changed our lives.
When the tragedy was unfolding, there were those heroes who rose to the occasion, helping their co-workers, sacrificing their lives for utter strangers, and providing help. There was not time to prepare for action. It was time to move. This was for what they had been equipped. Some of them just didn’t realize it.
On an airplane over Pennsylvania, a group of passengers also discovered what was going on. They rushed the hijackers in the cockpit, fully knowing the logical outcome, to save those they did not even know. “Let’s roll,” Todd Beamer said without hesitation. Just months later, his widow Lisa wrote: “Todd built his life on a firm foundation so that when the storm came on September 11 he didn’t have to check the blueprints to see if everything he had built his life on was going to stand. He knew.”
Six days after the plane crash, Lisa visited the site in Shanksville, Pa. In her book Let’s Roll, she wrote: “Todd isn’t here!” I said as much to myself as anyone else who might be listening. I knew at that moment, without a doubt, that everything Todd and I believed and lived for was true.”
A few weeks after the disaster as I was reading My Utmost for His Highest, a devotional book from the early 1900s, I flipped back to the entry for September 11. The passage started with: “Ministering as Opportunity Surrounds Us. This does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God’s in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us.” I thought of Todd Beamer and others who God had strategically placed that day.
And then, I was startled by the timeliness of the last sentence: “If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.”
I know enough about running marathons to know that it is gradual intentional training that gets one to the finish line, not an occasional sprint, but running the long hard distance when the weather is far from ideal and the pavement is endless and lonely. In life, it is the little decisions and daily situations that build up character, those times when no one is around, those times when we must make a hard choice. It is in the dailyness of life that our relationship with God is deepened, the dailyness that equips us for the crises of life. Daily Bible reading and prayer strengthen one’s spiritual muscles. We cannot know how - or when - God will use us, but we can be assured that He will.
Despise not
the day of small things.
Zechariah 4.10
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