A 9-11 Remembrance

Even since before our marriage, the game of Scrabble® has always been a favorite of Ken and mine. Years ago a friend gave us a new deluxe edition of the board game, and we gladly put our tattered then-twenty-year-old game “out to pasture.” It was easy to throw away the crushed box and the faded game board, but I just couldn’t part with the square wooden tiles of the game we’d begun our marriage with. Instead, I put the tiles in a little dish on the ottoman in front of our sofa. On a whim, I arranged some of the letters on the top of the pile to spell out D-E-B  L-O-V-E-S  K-E-N. Written as it was, on top of the mound of other lettered tiles, it took some concentration to make out the message, but eventually Ken noticed it.

So did our children. One day as I was dusting, I noticed the tiles had been rearranged. I took me a minute to focus on the new message, but when I did, there was no doubt who had left it. In the slang of our then teenage youngest son, it said T-R-E-Y  I-S  D-A  M-A-N.

That was the beginning of a marathon of messages from the Scrabble® bowl. A few days later our then ten-year-old daughter put her own name “in lights.” T-A-V-I-A  I-S  A-W-E-S-O-M-E.

Over the years, it became a family pursuit, and we never knew from day to day what message might be spelled out by the tiles in the bowl. Sometimes the tiles welcomed dear guests, other times they announced a special occasion, or communicated our love for one another. Often it simply served as a conversation piece. Occasionally weeks would go by and the message would sit, unchanged, forgotten.

On September 11, 2001, our family––like the rest of the world––was shaken by the tragic events in our nation. To make matters worse, Trey’s close high school friend was killed in a tragic car accident that week. Trey was asked to speak at the funeral, and made the seven-hour drive home from college in Iowa.

The following week, he drove back to college, Tavia started back to school, and we all tried to get back in our routines of life. But things seemed hopeless and bleak. I found it hard to work, hard to think about anything but the tragedies that had befallen our friends and our world.

One morning, Ken and I were sitting on the sofa together and when I looked down, I noticed that our little dish of Scrabble® tiles displayed a new message. In the unmistakable “penmanship” of our then 10-year-old youngest daughter, were three words that spoke of childlike faith, of courage, and of hope. Fifteen letters of the alphabet, arranged just so, offered us the strength to find joy in life again:

G-O-D  B-L-E-S-S  A-M-E-R-I-C-A.

Twenty-two years later those tiles are still on our coffee table. The collection has grown to include several games’ worth of tiles, and today it’s usually our grandkids who play with them and arrange them into messages (or tall stacks to knock over). Life goes on and God is still in His heaven—and in our thankful hearts.

What are your memories of that horrific day? How has God’s goodness shone through the darkness for you since that day?