5 Years Already

Wow, it's already been 5 years since September 11th. I guess back then I figured that by this time, we would be settling things in Afghanistan and starting to pull out. But now we're involved in 2 wars at the same time, which I don't think was a good idea. So, we have a military that is spread thin over 2 countries and having quite a difficult time in both arenas. Please pray that this turmoil can soon come to an end and more of our Americans can come back to the safety of their homes.

The first officially confirmed dead was Fr. Judge, a Catholic priest and fire house chaplain. His body was carried by the men in his fire house to St. Patrick's Cathedral and laid at the altar. To find out more about all of the 2,996 lives that were lost in the same morning 5 years ago please visit the 2,996 Project which has assigned one blog to write an entry memorializing the lives of each of the victims.

Everyone has their personal story about where they were the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Mine got kinda weird. I was in my dorm room 104 Center Hall at UofL. I usually got up around 6 to put on some headphones, listen to the radio, and do some homework on the computer while my roomates still slept (that was pretty normal while I was in college). My roommate, Tommy, had already gotten up because I had the TV on and it was on the local Fox channel. I heard them say something about breaking news and kind of huffed and thought what now, because just within the previous week, they had tried to make some big stir about some rollercoaster being stuck with people on it in Texas. When I turned to look, I saw the smoke coming out and then watched as the second plane hit, and my mouth dropped. I had a marketing class at 9:30 with a short quiz at the beginning, so I stayed and watched as long as possible before running to class. Our teacher had class like nothing happened, but it was extremely hard to focus. After class, all of the TV's around campus were on the news and it was hard not to find out what was going on. So I immediately heard about the pentagon, and the towers collapsing being that it was already 10:45. We heard that the University would not be cancelling classes for the day. I headed to the Interfaith Center, where the Catholic Campus Ministry is and made a plan with a few other students, our priest, and Campus Minister for a prayer service. We setup a quiet, candle-lit prayer space for people all day, and the couple students ran around posting fliers where ever we could to inform students. Many people of all denominations sought us out to quench their thrirst for prayer and faith. I spent most of the day crewing the Interfaith Center. However, I did have a night class, so I went back to the business school for that, and found everyone hanging around outside and found out that some funny-guy decided to call in a bomb threat on the Business School. The teacher was walking around finding everyone saying that it was riduculous to not cancel classes and to go home because he was cancelling his class.

Paix du Christ!