Jordan Powers

10 years ago, I had stayed the night at my parents as my dad and I were going golfing Early tuesday morning. When I woke up off the couch, my dad said “a plane ran into the world trade center”. Still groggy from waking up, I wasn’t exactly familiar with what the world trade center was. I didn’t care. a few minutes later, as we are watching live, they showed what we thought was a replay, and apparantly, so did the news anchor. It wasnt until several minutes later we realized it was a second plane. It started getting sort of scary. At that point in my life, I was already kind of doom and gloom, so I was kind of waiting for war to break out right then and there. We ended up going golfing anyway. It was eerily quiet on such a beautiful, warm, sunny day. Not much traffic, not a plane in the sky. After we were done with our round, we went into the clubhouse to grab a drink and something to eat and they had the live coverage on tv. At this point, we had not heard anything in a few hours. The footage showed the tower collapsing. I’m not sure if we saw it live our if it was pre recorded. I still did not quite realize the severity of what was happening before my very eyes. After I dropped my dad off, I ran home and was talking about it and watching the footage for a little bit with my friend and roommate Tom. At some point I either started thinking about it, talked to someone about it, or the news mentioned it, but I decided to go fill up my tank in fear of gas not being available for awhile. I sat in line for nearly an hour at two different gas stations waiting to get gas because the lines were so long.
After I filled up and got a few necessities ( junk food, pop, etc ), I ran back home and continued to watch coverage with Tom. Sorry to my other roommates if you were there and I’m not mentioning you, I honestly just don’t remember. I remember feeling all patriotic, wanting to participate in a revolution of some sort. I considered getting weapons and stocking up at one point because I really had no idea what was happening. I was so caught up in my own little world that I never paid attention to what was going on in the real world. I questioned God at this point, but not in the sense of “why would he allow this”, but genuinely curious about God in the since I felt something much, much bigger than myself. I was not a Christian at the time, but was definitely a “spiritual explorer”… whatever that means. I was also concerned that prices of everything would completely skyrocket… Luckily, I lived on raman noodles, and the $.89 fountain drinks at speedway. Anyway, everything between now and then has sort of blurred by. A lot of amazing things, and tragic things have brought me to this point 10 years later. I actually pay attention to what goes on in the world now, and found a new respect and love for this country due to what the people over the last several hundred years have gone through to make it great. Sure, we make huge, and often unspeakable mistakes, but at the heart of everything this country was built on lies something special.
I have also discovered the real God somewhere along the way. We’ve had, and continue to have our ups and downs, but it’s mostly my fault…well, it’s always my fault.
I have also gotten married to an amazing, grounded woman who is stronger than I will ever be, but is mostly responsible for making me stronger every day. 9/11 was tragic. Horrible. Overwhelming, etc. my heart will always go out to those who lost someone on that day, along with any other days.
People always ask how a loving God could let something like that happen. My response is to understand the logic of God is to have the logic of God. None of us do. I can live with it because I know that there is a reason for everything, and in my opinion, if 9/11 didn’t happen… so many amazing things that came out of it wouldn’t have either. *the photo may be blurry. Will re upload later.