I was one of the lucky ones. I had three and a half more hours in the old world than most did.

At approximately noon on September 11, 2001, I awoke and started my daily routine, the first thing of which involved breakfast. I don’t remember what I was getting. I just remember saying good morning/afternoon to Mr. Guy (what I call my grandfather).

“Boy,” he answered, “have you seen this about the plane flying into the building?”

I hadn’t, I answered, and continued to get whatever it was I planned to eat. Then I went into the living room to see what he was talking about.

Suddenly, I wasn’t very hungry anymore.

For the next few hours, I stayed glued (as most did, I’m sure) to whatever news source would give me updated information. A lot of the time, that was the web. Of course, I got the initial story from a hindsight perspective, but the following stories came in fast and furious.

I was in shock. As I’m sure we all were. After all, we’d just had our last hours of time in the old world.

We now know what we think is the entire story. We know that American pride is not as lost an idea as we all thought it was. We learned that we are not immune to the evil that this world has to offer, nor are we so unreachable that other nations will not rally to our side.

We’ve deployed into the field, and continue to deploy, men and women that we know, that are close to us. We worry about them. After all, we’re not living in the old world anymore.

Now a year has passed. It’s September 11th again. Today people will have birthdays and celebrate anniversaries (my friends Matt and Heather among them). Today most people will more or less live their daily lives as they did back then. But not all of them. There will be people, whose lives were so changed by this single event that life as they know it now is completely different, irreparable because of tragic loss.

I feel for them. And I know that you do as well.

This is but one of I’m sure thousands of entries that will be posted about the events of the day and how it changed their lives. Others will probably respectfully decline to post anything today, and I completely understand that as well.

But I write to make this point: believe it or not, some good things happened as a result of this. We were immediately made aware of our mortality in a way that none of us could have imagined before. We’d never thought of planes themselves as instruments of war before. But it brought home the knowledge that it can happen at any time to you, no matter what your state of body or mind.

As I said earlier, we came together as a nation. And that’s important. But even more, we came to God a little more as a result. And as something completely counterproductive to what the terrorists were trying to accomplish, I think that’s a little more than irony, don’t you?

These two things combined should serve as a witness to us that since the days are indeed few, we need to take the time to tell our fellow man. To those who are Christians and reading this, that means you, and that means me.

To any of you who are not Christians, I’d like to extend to you the opportunity to e-mail me any questions that you might have. Obviously, I can’t reach you face-to-face, but at the same time, I’d like to help in any way possible. E-mail me (link is in the left-side menu, under “contact”). I’ll go ahead and tell you. I don’t have all the answers. But I know where I can look to find them.