We have not forgotten

People. It's the people I think about, today, more than anything.

I had been at the dentists that morning - with a set of headphones from my CD player trying to distract me from the drilling. And I got in the car, and plugged the CD player back in, skipping the late-morning drive-time yammering on the radio.

So I walked into our office building at the Sprint world-headquarters campus in Overland Park, KS, rode the elevator up to the third floor, and discovered a huge crowd of co-workers gathered around the TV monitors in the elevator lobby. "What's the big deal?" I asked someone (thinking they'd finally found OJ guilty after all, or something equally as "important" as that).

"Planes have crashed into the World Trade Center," she responded, "and it's not looking good."

As the story unwound, the sense of unreality rose exponentially. Waves of shock, denial, anger, and futility washed over me. And over and over the question came: "How do people of supposed faith come to hate that much?"

Today, it's still about the people - the ones who died, the ones who lived, and the countless ones who lived and died trying to help. All gave some, and some surely gave all - truer words were never spoken.

I can't bring myself to jump into the debates about who should have done what, who should be doing what (and aren't), and the endless second-guessing and blamestorming. That's not where I am called to be.

In fact, my place is probably best on my knees, praying this:

May God have mercy on all of us, and forgive us that which we have done and left undone in the wake of this tragedy. Grant us wisdom to see the right path, so that the next five years might serve humanity better than the last five years have.