9/11 Experience

I was serving as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Tampa, FL. It’s a very pious time for most missionaries, where you are encouraged to be “in the world but not of the world” and therefore spend most of your free time studying the scriptures. You don’t have a TV or radio – you wouldn’t have time for it to begin with, and you spend all of your day talking with people and hearing about what’s going on in the world through them anyway. So my morning of 9/11/01 was just like any other morning: I got ready for the day, studied the scriptures for a while…

And then got a phone call from one of the people we had been teaching about Christ. She knew we didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio, so she just wanted us to know that our country was seemingly under attack.

She didn’t know that my dad worked in the World Trade Center.

One of the ways that missionaries are encouraged to stay focused and immersed in the work is to limit contact with home. They typically only call home twice per year (Christmas and Mother’s Day), and otherwise write (now e-mail) once/week. I could have called home to check on my dad and it wouldn’t have been a big deal (it’s not like you get your hands cut off or you get ostracized for “breaking mission rules”). I’m sure neither the Lord nor my supervisors would have thought anything of it, considering the events at hand. However, I didn’t. I had this overwhelming sense of peace that everything would be alright. I didn’t necessarily know what that meant, but I was at peace. So my missionary companion and I decided to continue on with our commitments like any other day. I know many, maybe even most, missionaries in the US found places to watch the events of 9/11 unfold, but we were at a local thrift shop instead. In addition to going door-to-door (the activity most commonly portrayed in popular media), missionaries spend considerable time serving in the community. We worked part-time at a thrift store that funded a school for underprivileged children, sorting the junk people donated from items actually worth selling. We heard bits and pieces of what was going on from people in the store, but otherwise we spent the morning hauling loads of broken donated goods to a dumpster.

Then we got a call from my mission president (the person charged with overseeing all the missionaries in the Tampa area), letting me know that he talked with my mom, and that my dad had actually switched jobs within the past week and was no longer working in the World Trade Center. Obviously, that was a great relief, and today I still consider a great blessing. He switched jobs, in part, to be closer to his family.

The next few days and weeks were nothing short of remarkable, and in the aftermath is where missionaries’ experiences wildly differ depending where in the world they serve. As a missionary, you are to be an ambassador of Christ to the people in the area of your service. In times like 9/11, foreign serving missionaries quickly realize that the idea of American Exceptionalism is not universal. For the most part, the average person in France or Japan or Russia or South Africa or Brazil or Chile or Cambodia cares as much about what’s happening in America as the average American cares about France, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, or Cambodia. The main difference is that Americans generally have a delusion that people in other countries think about the United States. Generally speaking, people in other countries don’t feel that anyone stays up at night caring about their national affairs, and they certainly don’t wet their pillows at night with tears obsessing over ours. Many of these other countries have their own “9/11’s” they’re dealing with, and most people have very acute and personal needs very much aside from anything happening in America. Most American missionaries serving in foreign countries weren’t terribly impacted by the events of 9/11. They were focused on serving the needs of the people wherever they were. I served in Florida, however.

For weeks and even months, every conversation revolved around the events of 9/11. At first, conversations were very raw and emotional. To be an ambassador of Christ is to literally mourn with those that mourn and comfort those that stand in need of comfort and to help in any way possible. It was certainly a time of mourning, and many people were scared and in need of comfort. We were let into more houses simply to talk in the aftermath of 9/11 than in any other time of my service. People just wanted someone to talk to, someone to be an outlet for emotion and sometimes pain and grief.  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t spent a few hours on the morning of 9/11 watching the events unfold in real-time, I had seen the pictures and more importantly lived the experience countless times through the eyes of those that had. Everyone's circumstances were different. For me, my calling wasn’t to live in the moment, it was to help those suffering from it. And I wouldn’t change that for anything.