Remembering a Day of Tears, Anticipating the Days Without Tears

I don't want to feel what I felt on 9-11 of 2001. I don't want to feel how I felt the bleak weeks after. It's too awful and I am already tearing up typing this.

There's a painting by an artist I like a lot--Melanie Weidner--that LOOKS like how I FELT that day 9 years ago. It's called "Willing to Weep."  (at left)  (She has a lot of hope-inspiring work, so visit her online gallery if you're feeling really down over this day's memories.)

Broken. Cracked in the heart. Spilling out. Psychically damaged. Unable to function.

We waste a lot of life and lives hating. They hate us. We hate them. They kills us. We kill them. Young people snuffed out. Men and women, babies and old people--they all suffer because we humans have a propensity for violence, distrust, misunderstandings, jealousies, greed, lust, and ...hate.

Fortunately, we also saw on that bleak day and on those bleak weeks and months and years after the fall of the towers and loss of thousands of innocent lives that people can also be courageous, unselfish, compassionate, generous, merciful, and hopeful. And resilient.

We can learn and move on.

But that day, and those weeks, and these past years, have left scars on our soil, in our hearts, and in our minds--and even on the bodies of some who survived. We can still weep. This is a good thing. To forget is not always wise. To be unable to cry is...to be dead. To hope and long for healing and progress is to be alive.

On the anniversary of every painful event in my life, my favorite Bible verse comforts me. It keeps me looking to a better day, when all these terrible things will be a shadow left behind, a memory erased, because there is no room for hate or evil or bombs or wars in the World To Come. I asked them to read it at my mom's funeral 6 years ago, and I am thinking of it today as we remember the awful events, the awful sufferings, the terrible massacre that happened 9 years ago today:

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

--Revelation 21:4

Maybe that can comfort you, too.

Go comfort someone today in some way, small or large, via words or hugs or smiles or a note or by painting something for someone or by singing a song to someone or by a donation to a charity that assists the victims of war-torn lands and lands oppressed by the hate-filled and tyrannous . Pray that those who lost loves ones that day have comfort today. Pray that those who have lost loved ones in battles that followed 9-11 and continue to this day are comforted. Give comfort...and you get it.

Until our tears are wiped away forever....