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September 11th, 2001. Will any American forget this day? I surely won't. My husband and I slept late that morning, for some reason I don't remember now. I went into my study, clicked on my computer and checked my email, which I always do first thing. Several emails jumped out at me without warning...Internet friends in Canada telling me how sorry they were for the horrible things that were happening, and that they were praying for America. Praying for America? Horrible things happening? What in the world....
I immediately turned on the TV, and then screamed for my husband. They were rerunning the first plane crashing into the first Twin Tower. What was going on? How could America be under attack? We were America, for heaven's sake. Nobody messed with us! But someone just did, and for all of our complacency, almost 4,000 innocent Americans died that morning.
Now it is eight years later, and I guess some of the horror of that day is gone...but never forgotten. For those of us who had friends, family, neighbors who died that day, the pain will never go away. For the rest of America, it is the memory that will never go away.
My grandson was ten years old at the time. His class, teacher and students, talked about that day for many weeks to come, as probably, did every classroom in the country. But one day, he asked me a question that I found very hard to answer. He said, Grandma, how come God let this happen? Isn't He always supposed to keep us safe?
I only had one answer for him. I don't know how good or accurate it was, but it was all I could say because it was what I believe. This is what I told him:
God gave every human on this earth a Free Will...a Freedom of Choice. He also gave all of us the tools to make this earth a good and safe place. He gave us intelligence, ability, creativity and knowledge. I'm sure it was His desire that we use those tools to create for ourselves a near-perfect place, where evil could not survive. But we didn't do it. There are people who have created bad things in life, rather than good things. These are the people who have chosen an evil path instead of a good path, but God can't do anything about that. Because if He did, He would have taken the freedom of choice away from them, and then He would have had to take freedom of choice away from those who only do good. God didn't create bad people, He merely created people with the free will to choose the kind of life they wanted for themselves, and there are those who choose evil and those who choose good. We have to live with that, and decide for ourselves which path to take. That's why all humans have Free Will.
My grandson wasn't too satisfied with that answer, but over the years, I believe he has come to understand it.
This is my belief. What is yours?
