The events of September 11, 2001 will be remembered for a long time. You don’t need me to tell you that. It’s unlikely anything I say here will make a lasting impression on you—but this trip I took to New York City in October, just one month after the bombings, certainly had an impact on me.
We didn’t want to go to New York as a bunch of clueless people, hoping we could stumble into some way of helping. Campus Crusade for Christ and King’s College (located in the Empire State Building) were assembling and distributing a booklet, a tribute to those who had fallen; it also contained a forthright explanation of the Christian faith. We volunteered to go to New York and help distribute it to New Yorkers. I’d never been to New York before; I didn’t know what to expect, and this sort of thing is not a typical activity for me. But I felt called to go.
We stayed next to an Episcopal church, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, just north of Times Square. The apartment we stayed in had roof access, so we ventured out onto the roof that first night. We also got a tour—in the dark—of the sanctuary in the church. This is a very old church.
It’s hard to see in the thumbnail on the left, but even after a month, the dust was still swirling in the air, and the camera picked some of it up with the flash. The picture of the organ on the right didn’t come out at all—flash can only do so much when photographing something four stories tall, in the dark.
The next day it was time to get to work. Our first stop was to visit Engine 54, who had lost an entire shift the morning of 9/11. Our group had a few teachers in it, whose students had made cards for the firefighters; we delivered them Saturday morning.
We left here and went to pick up our booklets; then our group split up, some headed to Central Park, some headed down towards Ground Zero. A young woman named Claudia helped up get to our destination without any trouble, going a fair bit out of her way to do so (thank you, Claudia!)
And then we came up out of the subway and could smell the charred wreckage, lingering in the air still, a month afterwards. I can’t tell you how sobering that is. We made our way towards Ground Zero, as much as we could; it was barricaded off, and the press of people made getting around difficult.
We felt that a large portion of the people near the barricades were likely to be tourists, and we were really there to reach New Yorkers. So we split up again, going several blocks away from the barricades, to see and talk to people who lived and worked in the area.
Any booklet or pamphlet—any tract we might hand out—is not really going to be that effective. That’s really not the point; we might pass out a few thousand of these things (and we did) and it might plant a few seeds that will grow later, but chiefly this was a tool for starting conversation, a way to get people to open up. And for that, it was effective. Everyone we talked to had a story, had been touched in some way. A little girl wondering when she’s going to be able to go home. Men and women who lost friends. One man took us to task somewhat for passing out tracts, when we could have been helping at Boulé Bakery, preparing food that the Red Cross would distribute.
All around New York we saw reminders. Pictures in windows; huge flags on the sides of buildings; piles of rubble stretching into the street and coverings on buildings. Cars still covered in soot and ash. And always, ever-present, the charred stink of devastation.
We weren’t the only people in New York handing out tracts and tract-like items. We saw Scientologists passing out hefty booklets; I admit we were amused at the number we saw in trash cans nearby. But we also found this tract, carelessly tossed on the ground. You can’t read it in the small image, but it says “Paid in Full.”
To me, this underscored that people aren’t interested in cold calls… a blunt tract isn’t going to meet them where they are. We saw very, very few of our own booklets in the trash, I think because it related to them directly, rather than just telling them this or that.
All in all it was an intense day. We talked to a lot of people, we handed out a few thousand booklets, and 9/11 became a lot less abstract for us. As we went back to the apartment by the church, we passed through Times Square. OK, we took a few tourist-y pictures. It’s necessary. Somehow I missed seeing the Naked Cowboy, though.
We finished up with a small party on the roof. Sunday morning we attended church at Redeemer Presbyterian and listened to Tim Keller preach. We had dim sum for lunch in Chinatown.
Sunday afternoon, before catching our flight back to Orlando, we went to Nino’s (a restaurant that serves meals to relief workers 24/7) to see if we could volunteer. They had plenty of immediate help… but they had some donated computers that needed to be broken apart and salvaged for useful components. Of all the things I never expected to do while in New York, scavenging useful stuff from computers was certainly near the top of that list. But it felt good to be useful.
I have just two more photos to share. The first is one I took from the roof, next to the church.
The contrast here, between an old-fashioned church and modern skyscrapers, in a way sums up the whole purpose of our trip. Can we, as Christians, make our message of hope relevant to today’s culture, without compromising the message? The truths are eternal; but it’s our job as evangelists to show how it applies in our day, just as it was the role of evangelists in the first century to show how the message applied. I hope we were able to do a bit of that in New York.
This is part of what 9/11 has left us with. It took us forty-five minutes just to get through the door at JFK, as they scanned every bag just to enter the building. I don’t mind the wait; that’s not the point. The point is that we’ve lost a lot of innocence. We’re a bit more paranoid than we used to be. But we’re not past the knee-jerk reaction stage; we run around putting band-aids on the problem instead of really thinking about what we can do without sacrificing what makes America really America. Do we really want to become a surveillance society, where everyone is watched all the time? Welcome to 1984. Yet we cannot ignore the events of 9/11; they demand our attention. Al Qaeda struck a blow, but in so doing helped a large number of Americans remember their national identity. My own thoughts and perspectives on these events are still swirling.
