10 Years.

So I've kind of been dreading today's post for days. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 just can't be overlooked, and yet nothing I can say can adequately give justice to ANYTHING about that day or the years since. And yet...it's too big of an occasion to not say anything about at all. Even a poor attempt is better than nothing at all.

I didn't fully understand anything about that day 10 years ago other than lots of people were dying and iconic buildings were collapsing. Slowly the pieces came together a bit more. I remember my teacher breaking the news to the class (although I had known already) and summing it by saying, "We are under attack." I remember the tears on our confused faces as we watched the coverage in the library at school and heard all the talk of other potential targets that day. And I remember it all felt unreal. All we knew as we watched those images was that this was something that we'd never stop hearing about. We were living history and watching it unfold, living moments we'd someday tell our children about as they studied about it in school.

The only thing that I understood, truly understood, was that this really shook the footing of the USA. I remembering thinking, When will anyone ever feel truly safe again in this country? Is that even possible?

And then I felt so guilty as this event was a wake-up call. Before that day my classmates and I were just stereotypical middle school kids worried about who liked whom, what we looked like, and how we were going to get whoever was currently grounded to talk their way into being ungrounded. In one day we were challenged --no, forced-- to see that the world was much, much bigger than ourselves. I felt terrible that I had been so self-absorbed before that. Ashamed, really.

And now it's 10 years later. I still struggle to see that the world is bigger than the one I see every day. I still feel ashamed when big and terrible things happen around the world and remind me of that, making my own worries so small and stupid in comparison. And honestly, it's still a little bit of an abstract thing to me. It always will be. I understand that it was an event with magnitude, and yet the only way it's truly personal to me is in the form of the people I know who have served overseas and also how it's increased my respect for the people in my family who are firefighters. A lot. Maybe that's more than some people have to make it personal, but it's certainly far less than a lot of others.

And I almost feel like a fraud for saying that my heart goes out to those people who lost someone on this terrible day a decade ago because I don't truly know anything about what they went through, not even second-hand. I've heard the stories and seen the pictures and tried to imagine it, but I will never be able to. That doesn't change the fact, though, that my prayers are with those people because God knows what they are dealing with and they do, too. And prayers never, ever hurt. I will continue to send my thoughts and prayers in their direction.

This song makes my heart ache every single time I hear it, but it also makes my heart swell with thanksgiving that not all hope was lost 10 years ago. This country took years to build and would take more than a day to destroy.