Today is the five year anniversary of a terrible day for our nation. As I sit back and reflect on how much that day changed the world, I am shocked as I begin thinking about how much it also impacted me and my life.
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On the one year anniversary of September 11th, I sat in a hotel room on a business trip in Takasago, Japan, typing an e-mail to my Sunday School class back in Orlando. We had decided to try to remember September 11th in a positive way, using it as a reminder to follow Jesus’s Great Commandment to "love our neighbors as we love ourselves". That Sunday, we kicked-off a campaign to raise money to build a church in India, dedicating it to the victims of 9/11. Our idea was to “build buildings in the name of love, rather than destroying them in the name of hate”.
I expected it to take us about 6-months to raise the money. Instead, we raised it in less than three.
In my e-mail to our class, I wrote:
Little did I suspect at that time that I would be going on (let alone leading) our trip. Nor did I suspect the impact it would have on my life.
Next year, Lord willing and after the church has been completed, we are going to try to organize a mission trip to visit them in India, fellowship with them and worship the God of all the world through Whom, all of this will have been made possible.
Three of us from my class ended up going – myself, Natalie Mumby, and Ana Pinto. We were able to visit the church we helped build and (from the back of an ox cart) I cried deeply when I first saw it. To this day, it remains the most beautiful building I have ever seen.
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While in India, I also taught several classes at an Indian seminary including one on Economics in Ministry. I thoroughly enjoyed it and began asking myself why I wasn’t doing this full-time? I was also deeply moved by the poverty I saw in rural India and thought economics offered some of the best answers for explaining why this was so. Two years later, I found myself having quit my engineering job in Orlando, FL and up here in Fairfax, VA working on my PhD in economics at GMU.
Had September 11th never happened, I doubt I would have gone to India. Had I never gone to India, I doubt I would be working on my PhD right now.
On this fifth anniversary of this terrible day, I would ask that we all reflect on how we can use the memory of our lost countrymen to answer the challenge my pastor gave me shortly after the attacks:My prayer is that we would all strive towards making this vision a reality. That we would try to raise works of love out of the ashes of destruction.
We should remember the events of September 11th by working to make this world so good that if those killed that day could come back and see how their deaths had inspired us, they could say: “Our sacrifice was worth it.”
As a wise and very courageous young man once said:
Let’s roll!!!
Related Links:
- Read my travelogues and see pictures from our trip to India.
- See our dedication page to raising money to build the church and our trip's webpage.
- Here is my original letter to our Sunday School class.
- An article I wrote for our church magazine about our trip.
- My Economics in Ministry presentation I used to teach my class in India. (And later used to teach a class to a Christian-based microfinance organization in Moldova.)
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