Every September 11, we see the buildings again.

The fire.

The smoke.

That impossible blue sky.

The collapse.

But the older I get, the less I think about the buildings.

I think about the people inside them.

Somebody woke up that morning and kissed a spouse goodbye.

Somebody left a coffee cup in the sink.

Somebody complained about traffic.

Somebody promised a child, “I’ll see you tonight.”

Somebody had just gotten married.

Somebody had a birthday coming.

Some mother was waiting for a call.

Some child went to school completely certain that Mom or Dad would be home later.

And they weren’t.

That is the part of September 11 that hurts me now.

Not the size of the towers.

The size of the ordinary lives that disappeared inside them.

I have written a great deal about staying.

I never really planned to.

It just kept finding its way into my books.

The one who stays.

The one who carries.

The one who refuses to look away.

The hand that remains when there is nothing left to fix.

In By What It Does, I wrote:

Good moves quietlythrough the world—unmarked,unpraised,and still holding.

I was not thinking about September 11 when I wrote those words.

Today I am.

Because September 11 showed us what hatred can do.

But I do not want hatred to be the thing I remember most.

I want to remember what answered it.

While people were desperately trying to get out of those buildings, firefighters were going in.

Think about that.

Really think about it.

Every human instinct must have been saying:

Run.

Get away.

Save yourself.

And they went toward the fire.

Some never came back.

Police officers stayed.

Emergency workers stayed.

Coworkers helped coworkers.

Strangers took the arms of strangers.

People carried people they had never met.

And somewhere high above the ground, surrounded by smoke and terror, people did something painfully ordinary.

They reached for a telephone.

That is the part I can hardly think about without feeling it in my chest.

Because when people believed they might have only seconds left, they did not call to talk about money.

They did not call to settle an argument.

They did not call to explain themselves.

They called home.

They said a name.

They said:

I love you.

Imagine knowing those may be your last words.

All the nonsense falls away.

The pride.

The grudges.

Who was right.

Who apologized first.

The thing you were angry about yesterday.

None of it survives the last minute.

What survives is a voice.

A husband.

A wife.

A mother.

A father.

A child.

A name.

And love.

Maybe underneath all the words we spend our lives saying, those are the words we were trying to reach all along.

I have written before that love does not always save us from suffering.

Sometimes love simply refuses to leave us alone inside it.

People in those towers could not save everyone.

Some could not save themselves.

But they stayed with someone.

They held someone.

They helped someone down one more flight of stairs.

They turned back.

They made a call.

They said a prayer.

They made sure another frightened human being did not face the end alone.

There is something sacred in that.

For those of us who believe in Christ, it should sound familiar.

Our faith is not built around a God who watched suffering safely from a distance.

It is built around a God who entered it.

A God who remained.

A God who showed us that love is not always escape.

Sometimes love is staying.

Sometimes love is carrying.

Sometimes love is refusing to look away.

And that is why, twenty-five years later, I pray that those of us who lived through September 11 have somehow emptied ourselves of the hatred that day understandably placed in so many hearts.

Not forgotten.

Never excused.

Never softened.

Evil was evil.

But hatred cannot have the final word.

Because hatred does something terrible before a weapon is ever lifted.

It erases the human face.

It turns a person into a category.

An enemy.

A symbol.

Something easier to destroy.

I do not want September 11 remembered only as the day hatred showed us what it could do.

I want to remember the other thing too.

The firefighter climbing upward.

The hand reaching backward on a staircase.

The stranger refusing to leave another stranger behind.

The trembling person holding a telephone and saying a name for the last time.

The husband saying, “I love you.”

The mother saying it.

The child hearing it.

The person beside them staying.

That is the human face I want to remember.

Not only how people died.

How people loved as death approached.

In another piece of writing, I used the line:

“I began because love was possible.”

Today those words mean something different to me.

Hatred is possible.

September 11 proved that.

But love is possible too.

The very same morning proved that.

And twenty-five years later, we are still choosing between them.

So today I remember the dead.

I remember the families who carried an empty chair home from that day and have lived with it ever since.

I remember children who grew up with photographs instead of a parent.

I remember spouses who went to sleep on September 10 believing they still had decades.

I remember mothers who would have given anything for one more phone call.

And I remember the people who moved toward another human being when every instinct told them to move away.

The ones who carried.

The ones who witnessed.

The ones who did not look away.

The ones who stayed.

May God grant rest to all those whose lives ended on September 11, 2001.

May He comfort those who have carried their absence all these years.

And may He keep us from becoming so consumed by hatred that we forget the final lesson left by those last phone calls.

When almost everything had been stripped away,

people reached for love.

Maybe we should not need the last minute of our lives

to remember

what matters most.

May their memory be eternal.