September 11 | Moments Almanac | Fingerprints

Welcome to Moments Almanac. This is a time for us to remember the people, places, and events that leave fingerprints on the soul. They came looking for fingerprints, not just the ones left by human hands. Afterward everyone did. Investigators searched steel, concrete, paper, phones, passenger lists, security cameras, anything that might tell us who had touched that terrible morning. And the fingerprints of evil were there. Hatred had touched it. Fear had touched it. Grief pressed its hand against nearly every window in America. And for a while, it seemed as though darkness had left its mark on everything. But it had not. On the shoulder of a stranger being carried through smoke. On the wheel of a boat turning toward Manhattan instead of away. On the hand of someone reaching through broken walls, because somewhere beneath the rubble a voice was still calling. There were fingerprints on stretchers, on fire hoses, on prayer benches, on photographs held tightly by people standing beside barricades, still hoping someone they knew, someone they loved, might walk back through the smoke. There were hands folded in prayer, hands digging through debris, hands passing water, hands holding strangers, hands dialing home just to say I love you. And maybe that is one of the mysteries of living in a broken world. God doesn't always remove the darkness when we ask him to. Sometimes he places a light inside it. A police officer, a firefighter, a nurse, a boat captain, a stranger, a friend, someone who decides that another human life is worth moving toward. And we ask, where was God? And there are no easy answers large enough for nearly three thousand empty chairs. No sentence can explain a child without a father, a husband without a wife, a mother waiting beside a telephone that will never ring. Faith should never pretend that grief is simple. Jesus didn't stand outside, suffering to explain it. He entered it, he wept, he bled. And perhaps that is why, even on a morning when hatred seemed to have the final word, love kept showing up. Climbing, carrying, searching, steering, praying, giving, going back again and again and again. Twenty-five years later, the fingerprints remain. Some remind us what human beings can destroy, others remind us what human beings by the grace of God can become. And maybe grace is not always a miracle that keeps the building standing. Sometimes grace is the person who walks into the falling building. Sometimes grace is a hand reaching for yours in the dark. Sometimes grace is simply this. Evil touched that day, but it did not touch it alone. The light was there too, quietly, courageously, stubbornly. And the darkness did not overcome it.