9/11 9 Years Later

I spoke at the monthly Men's Breakfast at my church earlier this month. This ministry year, we are focusing on being prepared for spiritual warfare. When I picked the month to speak at Men's Breakfast, it occurred to me that the first breakfast of the new ministry year would be September 11th. And immediately I thought there could be a tie between the September 11, 2001 attacks on America and the spiritual warfare theme.

As I finalized my message Friday night it struck me that I would be getting up to speak at about the same time that United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark on September 11th nine years ago. United 93 was the plane where the passengers stormed the cockpit and forced a crash landing in rural Pennsylvania to thwart the terrorist attack on the US Capitol building 124 miles away in Washington, DC. So I used the story of the American heroes on United 93 that had to make a choice very quickly that morning that they could have never imagined -- whether to strike back against terrorists and give up their life to win out over evil -- to open on Saturday morning. As I told the story in a summary timeline of the events on United 93 on September 11, 2001, and showed pictures of the WTC towers on fire, many men listening Saturday morning wiped tears away from their eyes. The emotional clarity that comes with a crisis or crucible like those attacks is hard to match in everyday life. But I challenged the men Saturday morning to be continually preparing spiritually for whatever may come their way from the enemy. We cannot wait for a crisis. There is no time for preparing in the crisis.

The time for preparing is now. The time for major decisions -- some of which if we are honest with ourselves we should have made already -- is now. So when we walk into a crucible event -- even one as small in comparison to September 11, 2001 as an application outage, a major customer issue or a big one like an ethical choice when no one is watching (well, when no other person is watching) -- we have to know already what things are up for negotiation or decision and which are not negotiable because we have already prepared and decided. So the lesson for all of us from 9/11 nine years later is prepare now, make the tough and foundational decisions now.