Thoughts from Our Bridge Pastor
Rev. Barbara K. Peronteau
Where were you twenty years ago? I hardly remember where I was yesterday, let alone twenty years ago. There are, however, people and events that mark our lives. We remember when we got married and maybe when we got divorced. We remember when our children were born, we remember when we graduated high school and college. We remember our first bicycle, first car and our first rock concert. Our parents remembered where they when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Dad was in West Virginia installing linoleum for The Armstrong Cork and Tile Co.
I was in the fourth grade at E Street Elementary School in San Rafael when someone entered our classroom from the hallway and whispered in the teacher’s ear. The teacher then turned to us and calmly said that the President had been shot. The big yellow buses were soon taking us home.
In January 1986 I was walking through the student lounge in Richmond Hall at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. There were several people gathered around the TV watching as the Challenger Space Shuttle was lifting off. I was curious, so I stopped to watch too. Within minutes the unimaginable happened.
Something amazing happens on the east coast every year as the heavy hot humid air of summer gives way to clear and cool Autumn air, as if on cue, as the calendar flips from August to September. Monday, September 11, 2001, was one such day. The sky was clear. The air was cool. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. If you looked straight up, you could see the dark of space. I had met my, then wife, at her school to set up a portable sound system for her classroom so she wouldn’t have to shout above the constant din.
I was running late to work. The car radio was set to WHYY, the public radio station out of Philadelphia. About quarter to 9 the news report said a “plane” crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I thought a “plane” as in a Cessna or Piper Cub bumped into a building. Not that big a deal. I wondered what happened on the ground though.
As I’m putting the car in park, the radio is telling me a jet liner crashed into the South Tower. I rush into work. We were all trying to get news of what was happening. Our methods were generational. Dad was tuning in the radio, I was futzing with the TV, and our two millennials were on the computer. A jet crashes into the Pentagon. Air space is shut down. Not a jet in the sky for the next three days. The South Tower collapses almost an hour after first being hit. We hear a jet crashed near Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh? What’s going on? When will this stop? What’s next? Later in the day three fighters flew low over head in formation toward New York.
We were all stunned. 2996 people died that day. I remember talking with a truck driver a few days later. He was stuck in traffic in New Jersey heading into New York City. All he could do was helplessly sit in his truck and watch it all. And cry. Life as we knew it changed forever.
As Christians we might wonder where God might be in all this. Was this from God? Surely not. Not everything that happens is from God. What I do know is that God embraces the vulnerable, the afraid, the angry, the suffering, the wounded, the lost, and the numb. God even embraces the big burley truck driver with tears running down his cheeks.
Rev. Barbara K. Peronteau, Bridge Pastor