On a sad anniversary, a moment of remembrance

In August of 2001, I was driving from California to Tennessee when I spent the night in Oklahoma City. Before I left the city, I drove downtown to visit the memorial for the Alfred C. Murrah Building, which had exploded 6 1/2 years previously. It was amazing how moving the memorial was for me, and I will be forever thankful that I took a couple of hours out of my trip to stop by. Especially considering that in less than six weeks, I was watching the remains of the Twin Towers smoldering on my TV screen and thinking of the quiet scene I had visited just a short time before, where I remembered for a lifetime that terror comes in many shapes and colors and is not necessarily a foreign affair.

Obviously, very little remains of the Murrah Building (sorry, but my pictures aren't scanned, and with the papal madness today, I couldn't scan them at work. Great pictures are available at the official site here.) If you saw the coverage of the memorial service today, you probably saw the 168 chairs, and the arches that have the time of the beginning and the end of the bomb blast on them. And of course there's the Survivor's Tree - the tree outside the building that somehow made it through when everything else fell down. But some of the most poignant things there weren't obvious. One was a little chapel just a block over from the memorial. Another was Symbols of Hope - a project where schoolkids from cities throughout the country painted china tiles that were sent to Oklahoma City and put on display. There was also a chain-link fence that was left from the ones that had been erected around the bombing site where people still leave notes and flowers. But the thing that was the most amazing is on the wall of a building next door to the Murrah Building. A sign said that it was spraypainted on there the day after the bombing by a search team the day after the bombing. It's something that I think of all the time.

Team 5
4-19-95
We search for the truth
We seek justice.
The courts require it.
The victims cry for it.
And GOD demands it!

Never forget, but do learn to forgive. And God bless you all.