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I hope we all did our Bible reading homework over the weekend...

I was amoung 6 that our pastor asked to take about 2 minutes to say a few words about our 9/11 experience: what we felt, learning of it; how our lives are different now.

Here is my prepared text:

September 11th, 2001

It was a retirement morning like any other -

waking up, cleaning up and getting ready

to go to Bob’s for breakfast.

The TODAY program was on TV,

a familiar noise at this time;

Just like any other morning,

but today seemed different:

Something was happening in New York...

Unimagineable! A deed dark and EVIL.

We were suddenly at war; not with a Nation – but an ideology.

Around 3,000 of us died that day – 19 of our attackers did as well.

September 11th, 2011

Life is different now.

Unknown men handle me in public places that I could not have imagined just 10 years ago.

EVERYONE is suspect in a way that Orwell had written about, 62 years ago.

Grandmothers and toddlers are

scrutinized and inspected;

their bags and their bottles:

empty or not.

Today, we worry about and prepare for a possible repeat of that fateful day, 10 years ago.

While the head of the beast is allegedly gone, the serpent writhes on:

spitting it’s venom from multiple sources.

We rightly lament the loss of those lives; snatched away by those with other ideas.

3,000 in one day by terrorists?

Why; that is HORRIBLE!!! Unspeakable – Satanic even.

But we have ideas in this country, ideas that are incorporated into LAW,

that snatch away life before it has a chance to begin.

More than half again as many in this country die - every working day - since then.

All because of a thing called: CHOICE.

It, too, is unspeakable.

Guttmacher Institute, compiling data from around the country,

says around 1.2 MILLION die yearly:

Right here in “GOD Bless America”

50 weeks a year (one must get a vacation);

5 days a week; yields 250 days that a CHOICE is made.

A CHOICE that abruptly terminates another human’s life

just as suddenly as those taken on 9/11.

An average of 4 thousand, 8 hundred lives: each and every DAY!

Oh; we still have our buildings after all of this; but what has been ripped from our souls?

3,000 cry out for VENGENCE! for 9/11/2001; while 12,000,000 have no voice, 10 years later...

I’ve just returned from a vacation, visiting a place where another loss of many lives occurred: Gettysburg.

Ideas – conflicting ones – clashed on an immense battlefield; and lives were changed afterward.

Today there is a serene, a reverent, an eerie peace to the scene. Memorials dot the land, and the landscape is green; instead of red.

One of our greatest men visited the area and spoke a few months after the conflict, saying:

Four score and seven years ago

our fathers brought forth on this continent,

a new nation, conceived in Liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition

that all men are created equal.

EQUALITY... It is found in Christ. Lincoln must have had that in mind when he penned ‘CREATED’.

St. Paul, in writing to the Galatians, said:

“There is neither

Jew nor Greek,

slave nor free,

male nor female,

for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

It’s too bad he didn’t add born and unborn: perhaps todays world would be different.