nine eleven

I have been reading the 9/11 tributes and memories that fellow bloggers and Facebook posters have posted.

I was teaching Spanish to my kids, along with my DH. We were barely into the first school year after our 4 year hiatus. I got a call from my step-mother, Kathie, to turn on the TV.
"What channel?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter! " she says.
So we turned in just after the first aircraft had hit, but before the second.
I feared... for my sons who were IN the Military, for our nation.
We watched all that day. By the next, we had to turn it off. The emotional toll was too much for us. We drove to our place of solace, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.
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This came to me today....
 So much of a person's greatness stems from great trials and tribulations. I thought of John Walsh... what would he be today, had his son not been kidnapped and murdered? It turned him into an advocate and spokesperson for justice.
None of us knows the path of destiny, the great calling that stands before us, until we go through the trials of fire. Until an event acts as a catalyst, many of us will not realize our call to greatness.
It isn't necessarily a national catastrophe that acts as the catalyst that brings us into our calling, into our maturity.
 One of my internet friends is facing the death of her five year old son. His death is inevitable. She is with him every day, as his condition slowly ekes his life from him, and she is helpless to stop it. She gains new strength to face his loss with every passing day. Meanwhile, she has adopted two mentally handicapped girls from the Ukraine, where they would would have been shunted from the orphanage to an adult psychiatric hospital to live out their days, when they reached 4 years old. May God bless the Parker family for bravely stepping in and DOING what they can do to help another soul in this earth. I know that I could no walk her walk at this moment, it would destroy me. Yet this was not a walk of her own choosing... events around her shaped this walk.

I am starting tomorrow on a new path. I hope it is free from tragedy and peril. But if it is not, may God's grace give me the strength to endure the path set before me.