More On 9/11

I grew up in Boston. Boston, as you may remember, was where the two planes departed from that were hijacked by terrorists and crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11. I knew a woman who was a passenger on one of the doomed flights. She attended my former church, Grace Chapel, in Lexington, MA. She was a grandmother, and on 9/11 she was on her way to California to visit her grandchildren. Needless to say, she never made it.

One of the flight attendants on 9/11 lived just a few streets over from where I grew up. The pilot of one of the flights hijacked on 9/11 lived just a few blocks from my sister-in-law's family. Almost everyone who lived in or around Boston on 9/11/01 knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who perished that day in the terrorist attacks.

Emotional pain can be a very deep wound. Even today, 6 years after 9/11, there is still much pain for many people in and around Boston, as well as in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, and even in Lima, Peru, where 6 families still mourn their loved ones who died at the World Trade Center.

6 years later, the wound is still open, and the wound is still deep. For those of us who are Christ followers, when faced with such a situation, sometimes the most important thing that we can do is simply to comfort those who are suffering. Just be a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, or an open ear with which to listen. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (TNIV) tells us that God comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort others in any trouble with the comfort that we ourselves receive from God. I think those verses are key to dealing with the pain that still remains for thousands of families, around the world, after 9/11. God comforts us, and we need to comfort others. Sometimes no words are even needed, just a sympathetic shoulder, a listening ear, a sensitive heart, and a box of tissues.