Last fall, I stood and looked up at a portion of the 360-foot antenna mast that once rested atop the North Tower now standing in front of a wall of the front pages of newspapers from around the world at the Newseum's display recalling September 11 (above photo). As always when I'm confronted with images and memories from that day, I felt a familiar conflict of emotions--from anger, frustration, and fear to anguish, loss, and the stark reality of my own blindness, culpability and poverty when it comes to grasping the extent to which our world is still so broken and lost. And, again, I struggled for some sort of way to respond to it all.Today, as I find myself again fumbling, I deeply appreciate President Obama's remarks at the Pentagon Memorial. Even as he urged us to not forget "the beauty and meaning" of all that was lost, he turned to the one place that I, too, find the path by which I can grapple with such days in which we hear the cries of a world that longs desperately for a love that restores and makes new and brings life:
Scripture teaches us a hard truth. The mountains may fall and the earth may give way, the flesh and the heart may fail, but after all our sufferings, God and grace will restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.And these words remind me that the God of scripture is one who is so powerful that he can weave, use and transform what was meant for evil and destruction into his mind-boggling plans for goodness, restoration, love and redemption. He calls, renews, enables and transforms us to live the way we were created to live, which includes what we respond out of when we encounter suffering and a broken world--something I again found reflected in the President's words this morning: "Not the human capacity for evil, but the human capacity for good. Not the desire to destroy, but the impulse to save, serve and to build."
Amen.
(Image: mine)