A few days ago, we gathered in the gym at school for a 9/11 assembly and showed a video of that day to more than six hundred students who were too young to remember what happened.
For me, the tears started as soon as the second plane hit.
Five minutes later, I backed up against a far wall, out of sight of my students.
A few minutes after that, I walked out. It was simply too much to bear. I wasn’t the first teacher to have to step outside and I wasn’t the last either.
Walking out was something none of us had had the luxury to do ten years ago.
By the time the school day had started ten years ago, two planes had struck the Twin Towers. We knew we were under attack. We had no idea when the attack would end. I struggled with whether or not to leave the TV on for my eighth graders and in the end, decided that knowing was better than not knowing at that point and so I left the TV on.
I still made my students do their assignment that day. I kept with my lesson plans which ironically had them writing an essay about the most important day of their life.
I remember the few tentative hands that raised. "Can we write about today?"
I don’t remember sitting down that day. I remember standing off to the side or in the back of the room and watching my kids. More than anything I wanted to crawl under my desk, curl up in a fetal position, and sob.
But I couldn’t.
Every now and then I would turn my back to the kids, to gather myself, but I didn’t break down in front of them. I couldn’t. I remembered how upsetting it was when I was a kid and I saw my teacher crying when the Challenger exploded. Teachers, parents—you need them to be rocks sometimes.
So I stayed strong because I wanted my kids to know they were safe.
Even if I couldn’t be sure that any of us were.
In Exodus, Chapter 14, the Israelites are fleeing Egypt. The Egyptian army is hot on their heels. There is absolutely no way they’re going to make it. The army is behind them. The sea is in front of them.
But the Israelites have something that the Egyptian army can’t handle.
The Israelites have the angel of God. Exodus 14:19-20 reads: “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.”
What follows in one of the most spectacular scenes from the Bible. Moses stretches out his hand and God parts the waters, driving the sea back so that the Israelites may cross. And after they cross, the water returns, drowning and carrying away the Egyptian army.
But it is this mysterious angel of God who appears as a pillar of cloud separating the Egyptians and Israelites through the night that interests me. This mysterious presence that keeps them safe, this mysterious presence that lights up the night gets lost in the wake of the parting of the Red Sea, but is just as incredible.
The angel of God. A light in the darkness. A light to keep us safe.
Sometimes in this cynical world, we lose sight of that light. We lose faith in God and angels. We don’t believe in miracles anymore. We think we’re on our own. There is no mysterious presence to keep us safe at night.
And whenever you think like that, I want you to think back to 9/11 because the angels of God were with us that day.
And in many cases, we were those angels.
Sometimes the angel of God moves mountains, sometimes the angel of God settles in our souls and a group of people destined to die can gather together to save hundreds as they did on Flight 93 on 9/11.
Every fireman, every police officer, every Port Authority officer, every person who helped someone live that day, every person who gave their life, every person who risked their life, every person who took the hand of someone else and just squeezed, every one of those people was an angel of God.
And every parent that night, who tucked their child into bed, and stayed maybe a moment longer than normal, every parent who held their child so that they would know they were safe in the darkness, every one of them was an angel too.
God bless America. And God bless its angels.
