Who Runs Toward Mayhem?

It was a hot, humid, August day in 1993 that Ruth and I pulled into Washington, D.C. After a cross-country trip from California, driving a 26-foot U-haul truck, we came to spend the next few years there walking with people in places of leadership, encouraging them both in life and in faith, had no idea that would last 15 years. And I had no idea that I would enjoy breakfast so much in all those 15 years, because soon after we arrived I got invited to a breakfast at an old estate house in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking the Potomac just across essentially from Georgetown University. 15 minutes from the State Department, 20 minutes from Capitol Hill, about a mile and a half north of the Pentagon as the crow flies. And every Tuesday morning from 1993 to 2008, I would show up there for an 8 o'clock breakfast. The breakfast had started years before when the then Attorney General Ed Mies, he and his wife had lost his son, a 19-year-old son, I believe, in an automobile accident. And during that time of grief in those one or two years that followed, a friend invited my friend Ed to meet with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and one of the person in just a little breakfast gathering on Tuesday mornings. Over the years that had expanded to include other people, former government leaders, and several ambassadors. So when I showed up in 1993, there were about 20 men essentially, some women, but mostly men, who met for that 8 o'clock breakfast at that old estate house. There were several memorable breakfasts, and I like breakfast just to start with, but have breakfast with friends like that is just terrific. And there were several really poignant memorable ones, but this one in particular happened on a pristine September morning. The sky was clear in Washington DC, the humidity had gone, it was the sky was what I would call Robin's egg blue, and we were sitting there together having just sort of wrapping up that breakfast. It was a little bit before 9 o'clock, and somebody came running out of the kitchen, saying something terrible has happened in New York City. It was September 11, 2001. And as I speak this to you, we are commemorating 20 years later that date. We jumped up from the table, most of us pressed into what was called the library where there was a television. And I was standing by an ambassador from a large North African country when the second plane hit the second tower, the South Tower. And he exclaimed, oh my God, and he ran out, got in his car with his driver, they went back to the embassy. We did not have very good relations with his country, but his president was the first person to call our president, George W. Bush, that afternoon saying we want to help in any way we can. This was the sequence that morning at 8.46 a.m., American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. In 903, United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. In 937, American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, and at 1003, United Airlines 93 crashes in a field in Changsville, Pennsylvania. In one hour and 17 minutes, the world, not just our world, the world was changed forever. The cost was enormous, oh the structural damage and price of property loss was 10 billion in property, but that wasn't the real price. The real price were over 25,000 injuries and 2,977 deaths victims killed by 19 terrorists. More than 90 countries out of the 200 independent countries in the world were affected, they lost citizens on that day. You had three things in play that day, intentional killers, ideologues, unsuspecting victims, and intentional responders. The first thing I thought of when that happened was to say where is Ruth, my wife. Once I had located her, we headed home about 20 minutes from that estate home that I was talking about. But you could hear sirens for hours because we were just a mile and a half north of the Pentagon. You could hear the impact when that plane went in, and that day people are sitting glued to their television sets. People were encouraged to stay off the streets in the larger Washington DC metro area. And by evening time there were candles lit and placed on stoops and doorsteps across the whole region. And that next day when you drove down major highways on the overpasses, you would have signs saying God bless America and American flags flying from those overpasses. You had members of the United States Congress who for days and weeks and years are at each other's throat standing on the east steps of the White House, singing God bless America. And a week later, because on Tuesday mornings I would go to that breakfast and on Tuesday afternoons, I'd go to a small group meeting with four or five fellows in a in the chapel that is situated just off the return of the Capitol. And on that following Tuesday, because we always met Tuesday at 4 p.m. We walked out of that chapel. They had called for a special prayer service on that Tuesday following September 11th. So this would have been September 18th. And when the four or five of us walked out of that little chapel area into the retunda, there are only two people there, one police officer on one end of that circle or on one side of the circle and another on the other side. But there were chairs set up in circles with some kneeling benches and that late September gold light was coming in through those high windows and it felt like a sanctuary. The day surrounding that were just an ongoing mix of challenge and remembrance and mourning and tears and angst all of those things compressed into that several week time period. You know, we think of 20 years ago and in order to catch a feeling for something, I think you have to hear what people said about it. I just have picked two quotes to share with you today. One was by author David Levitton who put it this way. What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos is the ability to mourn people we have never met. How many nations, how many families, how many children, how many spouses were and have been devastated, the course of their lives changed by that. And when they commemorate that day, September 11, 2001, person after person at the site often will step to the microphone and give some thought about a loved one lost. I love what Catherine Hernandez said seven years later at a commemoration in 2008 at what we called then ground zero. This is what she said about her dad. My father, Noberto, was a pastry chef at windows on the world in tower one. For 10 years, he made many fancy and famous desserts, but the sweetest dessert he made was the marble cake he made for us at home. Whenever we parted, Poppy would say, Te amo, Biocon Dios. I love you, go with God. And this morning, her words on the morning of 9-11, 2008, I want to say the same thing to you, Poppy. I love you. Go with God. That's one of those moments, 9-11, when those of us who were old enough, remember precisely where we were. I had a friend in an airplane flying back from Zurich, Switzerland. And they were out over the Atlantic and almost imperceptibly without tilting the wings just in a flat turn. The pilot turned and headed back to Zurich. And when they touched down, he came on the microphone and said, we have landed back in Zurich because the United States is under attack. I don't think it was just the United States that was under attack. I think it was an attack that shook the foundations of the planet for a whole range of reasons that we don't have time to get into on this podcast. But I do want to say this, that in those three categories of people, and there are others, I'm sure, intentional killers, unsuspecting victims, and intentional responders, the folks that we can reach out to today, most easily, are the intentional responders. I live in Windsor, Colorado. A few years ago, I pulled up behind a fire truck on Main Street in Windsor, and I saw a very strange sentence. It said, stay back 343 feet. I thought to myself, how in the world am I supposed to guess that? I'm already like 15 feet behind. I'm too close. You know, I'm thinking in my head, well, I grew up in a city called Oakland, California, and the average length of a city block is 300 feet. And how do I judge that to do 343? And I saw that several times over the next few weeks and months and finally, one day, I just stopped by the fire station. And I went in and said, excuse me, but I have a question. Could I take a photo of the back of at least one of your fire trucks? Maybe they all have this. Because you've got that 343 thing on there, and I just wanted to check it out, and they were gracious and had me come in and I took them. I said, why? First of all, how do I know how to stay back 343 feet? I can't. But secondly, why that? And the young fireman looked at me and said, because we always wanted to remember the 343 firefighters who lost their lives on 9-11. When everybody else was running for their lives, my words now, 343, mostly quite young men were running toward the place of disaster, ready to give their lives, which they did. In addition to those 343 firefighters, 72 police officers lost their lives on that day. My question is this, what does unconditional sacrifice look like? It looks like that. People running toward the conflagration, people running toward collapsing buildings, people running toward the mayhem. What does the heart of service look like? Well, it looks like those men and women who are sworn to protect and to save. The scripture verse that comes to mind for me when I think of 9-11 has to do with value. As you listen to me this day on this podcast, I just want you to know, and I don't know most of you, hardly any of you probably. Each of you has value, eternal value, and those you know have value, and those you don't know have value. Those of us who read scriptures, whether the Old Testament, Torah, Prophet, Psalms, or New Testament, what we call the Bible, many of us know what is called the Great Commandment. You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, your whole being. The second is like it, and love your neighbor as yourself. Until 9-11, 2001, I always saw that as the Great Commandment. On that day, watching the horror experiencing some of the horror of that day, I saw that it can only be a commandment if one is designed for it, because in those floors and the twin towers, in those top floors where people were trapped and never made it out, two kinds of calls were being made. One was, God helped me, and the other was, honey, I don't think I'm going to make it. I understood on that day that that's my design. I'm designed for those two calls, because those two recipients of my calls give me value. They are in no small part, maybe completely they are, what gives me the value that I experience, the value that I come to know. The key verse about service that comes to my mind, I take from the writings of Mark in the New Testament when it says about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom from any. The value of an object is determined by the price someone is willing to pay for it. In closing, I say to you what Catherine Hernandez father, her puppy, would say to her when they had that marble cake at her house, and he left. He would say, Te amo, Biocon Dios, I say to you this day, Biocon Dios, go with God. This is Dick Foth with stories to make sense of it all.