Twenty-Five Years
A Devotion for September 11, 2026
Psalm 46:1–3, 10
“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging… Be still, and know that I am God.”
I was twenty-two years old when the towers fell.
Neither of my children had been born yet. They have never known a world before that Tuesday morning, and sometimes I forget that I did.
I grew up in the eighties and nineties. The world I remember was certainly not perfect, but it felt different. Before endless wars and machines in every pocket that can amplify our anger, monetize our division, and carry the worst of us everywhere at once.
Maybe some of that is nostalgia. But not all of it.
Something changed.
Twenty-five years is not very long in the life of a nation, but stand at this end of those years and look back, and the other side can feel like centuries.
Scripture knows something about that kind of remembering.
When the foundation of the second temple was laid, some of the older people who remembered the first temple wept aloud (Ezra 3:12). They remembered what had been. They knew what had been lost.
Grief over what was lost is not weakness of faith. Sometimes grief is simply what love sounds like when it remembers.
Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people did not come home that day. Office workers who had only poured a cup of coffee. Travelers who had only fastened a seatbelt.
Passengers aboard Flight 93 who, in the space of a few terrifying minutes, decided that other people would live because they were willing to act.
Then there were those who ran toward the smoke. Three hundred forty-three firefighters. Officers of the Port Authority Police and the NYPD. Paramedics. Chaplains. Rescue workers. Ironworkers. Volunteers who came from everywhere and eventually dug through the wreckage with their own hands.
Jesus said:
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
We usually reach for that verse at funerals. Read it again as a description of a stairwell. While thousands descended, they climbed. They knew enough about what waited above them to understand the danger.
And they went anyway.
Jesus said that the highest form of love is a willingness to lay yourself down for another, and on that morning men and women preached that sermon with their feet.
Remember also those who answered afterward.
More than two decades of deployments. Young men and women who enlisted knowing the world had changed. Service members who left spouses, children, parents, and ordinary lives behind. Gold Star families who have lived with an empty chair at the table ever since.
And remember those who are still dying slowly.
Responders, residents, recovery workers, and cleanup crews carrying cancers, respiratory disease, and other illnesses out of the dust. Families who have now spent a quarter century discovering that for some people, the attack continues, quietly, slowly.
Their suffering did not end when the news trucks left. Neither should our remembering.
Here is what Psalm 46 does not say.
It does not say the mountains will hold. It does not promise that towers will stand. It does not promise that the ground beneath us will always feel secure.
It says the earth may give way. The mountains may fall into the sea. The waters may roar. Everything we thought immovable may suddenly move.
And still-
“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”
Our peace was never supposed to rest in the stability of the ground. It was never supposed to rest in a decade that felt safer, a culture that felt kinder, or a nation that seemed less divided. Those things are gifts when we have them and griefs when we lose them.
But they were never the foundation.
“Be still, and know that I am God” is not merely a command to calm down. It is a command to stop searching for permanent footing in things that were never permanent. Even in pain, God tells us where all of history is going:
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
Every tear.
The ones cried on September 11, 2001. The ones cried beside hospital beds in the years that followed. The ones being cried this morning by families whose loss began twenty-five years ago and still is not finished.
So perhaps the best way to honor those who sacrificed is to live in a way they would recognize. The firefighter climbing the stairs did not stop to ask who the stranger above him voted for. He climbed because someone needed help.
The police officer did not ask whether the person running toward him shared his politics. The stranger did not ask another stranger whether they agreed on everything before reaching out a hand.
For one terrible morning, people remembered something we are in danger of forgetting: Your neighbor is still your neighbor. That is remarkably close to the standard Christ gave us.
Love your neighbor. Love even your enemy. Bear one another’s burdens.
Twenty-five years later, perhaps remembering September 11 should do more than make us look backward. Perhaps it should make us ask what kind of people we intend to be moving forward.
Let us pray:
Heavenly Father, today we remember those who were lost, those who ran toward the fire, those who answered in the years that followed, and the families who are still carrying wounds that began twenty-five years ago. Comfort them in ways we cannot. Where our world has grown hard, soften us first. Where the ground beneath us gives way, remind us that You have not moved. Be our refuge. Be our strength. Teach us to be still and to know that You are God. In Jesus’ name, amen.
