From the Sidelines

For some reason I wake up today thinking about September 11, 2001.  It’s February, 2013 and I have no idea why this is my first thought of the day.  Yet there it is – 9/11 from my own lived perspective – at a distance, safe in Princeton, New Jersey, a seminary student with a summer semester under my belt, believing I might have something to offer into that horror, but having no way to offer it.

Feeling frustration as well as fear and anxiety, I went with some friends to Costco and we bought all we could from a list of needed emergency supplies, took them to the local warehouse drop off point and left them.  While shopping, we had the illusion of helping, but dropping off the water bottles and other sundries, we realized we weren’t even a drop in the help bucket.  We prayed of course.  And we gathered and we vigiled.  And in our hearts, we felt we did nothing.

It was our nation’s crisis, but in that safe haven so close but so far, somehow it wasn’t ours.

Why did I think of that time, that feeling, today?  I wish I knew.  I wish I knew what lessons there might be waiting to be drawn from the sidelines.  I wish there was some pithy sentiment that wrapped it all up neatly in a package marked “lesson learned”.

But there isn’t.

There’s just that feeling, that horrible feeling, of great need and the inability to meet it.

Why today, Lord?  Why today?