This has been quite a weekend. The death of Queen Elizabeth II and the events leading up to her funeral, and the twenty-first commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on our country. People will often ask where you were when such significant events happened. I remember that September morning well. Chester and I were on a red tile roof flashing a chimney two streets over from Henry Clay’s estate, Ashland, in Lexington when the owner came out the front door, looked up, and told us a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. The job took much longer than it should have that day as we kept listening on Chester’s transistor radio to the ongoing news of the second plane striking the other tower, of the destruction to the Pentagon, and flight 93 which crashed into that field in Pennsylvania, certainly on its way to Washington D.C. It was only at the end of the day when I returned home that I was able to see the coverage and the damage. I have not been back to New York since before the attack, I haven’t been to the filed in Stoney Creek. I did see the Pentagon when I officiated at my father and mother’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery where their gravesite overlooks the repaired complex. On Thursday I again was working when the news of the queen’s passing came. It was not until I returned home late in the afternoon, after delivering flood supplies to Eastern Kentucky, that I heard the news. While the loss of Elizabeth was not unexpected, not so with 9/11.
When Elizabeth became Queen at age twenty-one, she spoke from Cape Town, South Africa and said: “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise that was well kept through peace and war, in times of tranquility and discord, of personal happiness and great pain and loss. As we remember those who died in the attacks, we too hear of people who dedicated their lives to others. The firefighters, police, civilians who put their lives at risk, many perishing doing so, trying to save others. We heard of those at the Pentagon rushing into the damage to save those children in the nursery and others from fire and debris. Those passengers on Flight 93 who hearing of the other attacks realized that their plane too had been turned into a weapon of war, who rushed the hijackers causing them to crash the plane in a field rather into a building in our nation’s capital. Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15: 13). And how much love when you do so for those you do not know? In the sermon on the Mount, Matthew records Jesus saying, “You will know them by their fruits.” As I reflect on the life of Queen Elizabeth and those valent ones who put their lives at risk saving others, I see great fruit. May we consider their lives and in the times that matter, may we to bear fruit worthy of our name, Christian, whether our lives be long or short.
Peace,
Bryant+
