It was a regular Tuesday morning. I was in eighth grade. My mom had the radio tuned to her favorite news station while we got ready for the day. All of a sudden, she zoomed down the hallway and turned on the TV.
TV? In the morning? It wasn’t a usual occurrence at our house.
She called me in to watch. Smoke billowed from a skyscraper in New York. One of the Twin Towers, the newscasters said. I had never even heard of them before. We watched in horror as a plane crashed into the second tower and exploded. Live footage showed both towers collapsing, one after another. Lower Manhattan became engulfed in a cloud of smoke and debris.
Reports trickled in of other hijacked planes. An attack at the Pentagon. All air traffic stopped. A possible car bomb. International flights rerouted to Canada. The country was in chaos.
That day, I grieved for those who wouldn’t get another chance to spend eternity with God. Then, one of my peers at the Christian school I attended made a sarcastic comment that stung then and even now: “Great…now we have to go to Bible class and listen to our teacher talk about ‘all those lost souls.’”
I wanted to yell and scream at him, and maybe even hit him upside the head with my hardcover Bible. But, thankfully, I controlled myself and didn’t even respond. No lecture from me was going to improve his attitude. He clearly didn’t understand the reality and the gravity of the morning’s events.
But then again, did I really? I felt grief over it, but that grief didn’t change my life at all. I didn’t go out of my way to spread the Gospel after that. I lived life just as I had before. School, church, piano lessons, youth group, volunteering at Awana, Bible study, rinse, repeat. Apparently, I wanted to learn about the Bible, but was I sharing it with any extra urgency? I don’t think so.
Proverbs 27:1 says, “Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.” None of us knows what tomorrow holds. I pray that it is nothing so painful as more terror attacks, but even so, there are people out there who haven’t heard the Gospel yet, and that’s on us. We don’t know when death will arrive, so let’s not waste a single opportunity to share the Gospel.
“From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). May we never forget this lesson.
Jessie Chamberlain
Family Radio Staff