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Morning Meditation
September 19, 2025
Scripture: Exodus 15:19-21
When Pharaoh’s horses, chariots and horsemen[ went into the sea, the Lord brought the waters of the sea back over them, but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground. Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
“Sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
Both horse and driver
he has hurled into the sea.”
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
One of the challenges of teaching children ages three through twelve about our faith history is the frequent juxtaposition of redemption and celebration with terror and violence. As adults we want to, and often do, downplay the violence and destruction revealed in scripture. We can make short shrift of the slaughter of the innocents depicted in Matthew 2:16-18. Some of this resistance stems from our culture and sanitizing the Christmas season, & some of stems from our human compassion – it just isn’t right to malign innocent young minds with the inconceivable violence that Herod invoked upon scores or hundreds of boys two thousand years ago or the crushing deaths God invoked upon the Egyptians pursuing Moses and the Jews through the Red Sea.
The challenge then becomes how we nurture our children & indeed ourselves to understand what scripture is conveying in scenes such the death of the Egyptian army and the slaughter of innocent boys in Bethlehem. The underlying lesson and expostulation frames how we comprehend the contrast of redemption and its joy and celebration with violence and its destruction and desolation.
In 2009, I was watching the ABC Evening News (yes, it sounds ancient). Diane Sawyer had a segment about the 8-year-old children who were born after their fathers were killed on September 11. She featured an eight-year-old boy, Jack, who could not reconcile losing the person who gave him earthly life without ever having known him. He was inconsolable and couldn’t respond to his mom or Diane Sawyer through his tears. I added Jack and his sixty-plus peers to my prayer journal. I plagiarized my prayers for these kids from phrases Diane Saywer used – that in time these unfortunate kids could find peace, perhaps even joy, understanding that they could live in the light of someone they never knew and that all that’s in their life to come, derives from the life their fathers gave them.
As if September 11th hadn’t invoked enough on these kids, they turned eighteen and graduated high school in 2020 – the height of the Covid pandemic when celebrations and accomplishments were relegated to yard signs and vehicular processions through suburban streets. This circumstance motivated me to attempt something, anything compensatory. Using the googles and Facebook, I located and wrote to Jack’s mother and relayed my decade-old prayer to her. She wrote back that Jack had reconciled himself to the tension we all experience in which celebration and desolation co-exist. She added that for the most part, Jack had experienced a healthy, nurturing upbringing. She had remarried, Jack had enjoyed five brothers’ and sisters’ companionship, and he was heading to college.
With his parents’ permission, I wrote to Jack about my prayer, and he wrote me back. He relayed that what surprised him most in my letter was the line in which I wrote, “your prayer has been a gift to me for a decade, Jack. You’ve reminded me daily to value the time and experiences I have every day with my sons.” I never imagined that through some telepathic power Jack would have known about my prayer and felt closer to God or better about his dad’s violent death. I had discerned that his prayer was as much a healthy discipline for me as it was a prayer for somebody I had never met. Jack’s prayer channeled me toward a more thoughtful, appreciative approach to Charlie and Conor. Jack’s experience reminded me daily that common joys and pleasures can cease in an instant. Joys you expect can be precluded by events unimaginable. Our task lies in finding balance.
As an epilogue, Jack went on to the University of Wisconsin. He will be 24 years old next month.
The video segments Diane Sawyer produced can be linked at:
Diane Sawyer, ABC, 9/11 Segment 1
Diane Sawyer, ABC, 9/11 Segment 2
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