I remember September 11th, 2001 like it was yesterday. I was sleeping on my couch/bed/horribly uncomfortable futon when the phone rang. I didn't move. My mom left a message on the answering machine: "Meg, Miss...it's mom...wake up...turn on the t.v. right now"...
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April 7th, 2001, I was on a bus with 60 or so other students heading for a field trip to the World Trade Center & the United Nations. I remember that trip so vividly...the towers were so big that I almost fell over just trying to look up at them. Overall my life felt as full of endless possibilities as those towers. Little did I know that day would end with a blow I never saw coming…
Ross & Elaine Munro were separating. This news didn’t make national headlines, but if you knew my family, you knew it was nothing short of devastating. It shook the very core of my being until my life felt like it was seconds away from collapsing. Everything I knew of life was ripped out from under me. Everything was going to be different, and no matter what I did I was never going to change what happened that day. The next several months of my life were nothing short of chaos.
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...I fumbled around in search of my remote that sunny, not a cloud in the sky, East Coast September morning. I was irritated to be awake, and numb to feeling alive. I turned on the news to feel that sinking feeling everyone in the nation felt - nothing was going to be the same. I sat in shock and horror as the north tower burned, I gasped as the south tower was struck and we realized this was no accident. My sister and I periodically looked out the window when planes sounded low (we lived 18 miles from the Philadelphia Airport, so that was a lot). We watched both towers collapse. I felt like the whole world was collapsing with those towers. They had served as a painful reminder to me of a day I was never going to get back; now they became the same to an entire nation.
That day marked a spiritual awakening in my life. I wanted to live for more than my pain…I wanted to fight even though I felt like I had nothing left to give. I gave the broken pieces of my life to God that day, the ones I had been trying to fix on my own. I was ready for Him to rebuild me.
On September 11th, 2004, I found myself boarding a plane I questioned getting on. I was scared out of my mind; so much so that I nearly called my mom 50 times to come pick me up. I wasn't afraid of any man or machine, I was making the biggest decision of my life and I was about to bail. I made at least 5 trips to the bathroom to get sick, during the last one finding myself making a plea to God for a sign that I was doing the right thing. (He gave it to me, but that is a whole other story). It was around 8:30am in the morning that my flight took off for Kansas City. The sky was reminiscent of that early morning 3 years ago; so blue, clear & full of sunshine.
I felt like my life was just beginning on that anniversary of such horrible endings. The past 3 years had been a whirlwind of gutting out the broken pieces of my life. Those pieces were gone, but never forgotten.
I stepped off the plane into a world I had never experienced before. I had never felt so much peace about anything in my life, & I never once questioned if it was the right move. I felt full of the same feeling I had when I visited the towers 3 1/2 years earlier - overwhelming possibility. It was a new beginning.
God has spent these last 10 years rebuilding my life in too many ways to articulate. He has used so many people to impact my life along the way and believe in me in ways I never thought possible. Those people have become the every day heroes in my story. They have helped pull me from the wreckage, and walked me through to new life. I will never be the same.
Out of death God has rebuilt my life into something completely new. I will never forget 9/11. Never, ever, ever.
