As I packed away my laptop to head into the building at a job I had just started a week earlier with Roche Diagnostics in Indianapolis, I caught the tail end of a new broadcast that said a small private plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember thinking, How can you be so blind as to crash into a building? Shaking my head in disbelief, I turned the car radio off and walked toward the building. Had to be an idiot. Leave it. Not important. Time to focus. New job. Chance to make meaningful changes. Then the world changed out from under me, and I could not turn away from the events of the moment.
As the moment swelled with relevance not on anyone’s agenda that day, I remember feeling sick and fighting down terror that the towers were only the beginning. I remembered that same fear when I hid under my desk in the fourth grade and covered my head, practicing life-saving precautions because a nuclear bomb attack was on the minds of us all. Were we at war? Under attack? Then the Pentagon. Then Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. What was next? Sears Tower in Chicago? Chase Tower downtown Indy? The towers coming down were shocking, but the fear of what’s next was palpable. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was no turning away from what the new reality showed on our televisions in the breakroom. As a new Director of Sales Training, with a team of developers and trainers looking around, asking their own questions, I dismissed everyone and told them to go home and be with their families.
I watched the news this morning, and it featured a segment that paralleled the 9/11 timeline 24 years ago. They run the segment once a year on the 11th. I did not want to see it again. I knew the story because I watched it live on TV, but I watched it again, just like I do every year… all of it. I cannot turn away. I don’t have the right to turn away. I have a right… a duty… to remember.
Strangely, the horrors and terror of 24 years ago keep surfacing—the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, mass shootings in Colorado and Tampa within the last 24 hours. We cannot keep turning away without turning to God. I turn to God and His Living Word for comfort and direction, but I cannot overlook the words of a favorite song by Pink Floyd – “On the Turning Away” that resonate deeply with me.
Pink Floyd – On the Turning Away Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
[Verse 2]
It’s a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud
Over all, we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we’re all alone
In the dream of the proud
[Verse 3]
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
Mesmerized as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
* * * * * *
Turning away from hate will have power only to sustain that turning if our turning is toward our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Peace! G.