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Morning Meditation
September 10, 2026
Reading: 1 John 4:16-21
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
Meditation by Glenn Beamer for September 11th: “All available boats, this is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone want to help with the evacuations of Lower Manhattan report to Governor’s Island.”
September 11th was a seminal tragedy for people in the United States, and it was the last seminal event our country would experience before the advent of Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and the Instagram (2010). We relied on the three networks, CNN, and clunky on-line versions of the New York Times and Washington Post as events unfolded.
Because the media appropriately focused on the World Trade Center, the inferno at the Pentagon, and Flight 93’s crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, we wouldn’t learn about quiet heroism and aid that many brave individuals rendered. The largest of these efforts was the massive boatlift that provided safe voyage to 500,000 individuals who found themselves isolated and scared in lower Manhattan, seeking safe refuge from an unprecedented and unpredictable calamity.
Pete Johanson was a supervisor with New York Waterways on his way to Battery Park. Minutes after Flight 11 struck the north tower, the Battery Park boarding platform overflowed with people desperate for safety. For 16 hours Pete Johansen coordinated medical triage, cleaning toxic dust off people, and boarding hundreds of never-ending lines of New Yorkers on boats to get them across the Hudson and East Rivers.
Eight hundred skippers, sailors, and mariners in 150 boats and watercraft responded and humanely rescued one-half million scared, sometimes injured, souls that day without panic. One ferry rescued a man who had taped plastic pop bottles to himself, jumped into the Hudson River, and attempted to swim to safety.
Two things impressed me about the September 11th boatlift. First, mariners recognized had the resources with which to respond to a completely unpredictable and unfolding calamity. New York Waterways devoted its entire 24 vessel fleet as did commercial fishermen, recreational boaters, tour boat and tugboat operators. None of those volunteers perceived how dangerous their work was or threats unimagined, yet scores answered the call to help.
The second impression connects with 1 John, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” On September 11th, the helpers overcame their fears and boarded innocent and injured people of all ages, ethnicities, religions, orientations, and professions and brought them to safety. Traumatized New Yorkers helped each other get medical aid, clean crusted dust off, and prioritize who needed to be transported immediately and who could wait. People reassured one another. People cooperated and extended God’s love as God intended, without discrimination, without judgment.
After September 11th, Emily and I committed resources for a scholarship for a young William and Mary graduate, Jim Reilly, who was 25 years-old and worked on the 78th Floor of the South Tower. Jim Reilly’s family and fraternity endowed a scholarship in his memory and pledged the proceeds of the fraternity’s annual wiffle ball tournament. In comparison to the boatlift the James B Reilly Scholarship in Public Policy has been a modest endeavor. Nevertheless, it reminds us that God has given us abundant resources, and we are at our best when we aren’t afraid to use those resources and have the courage to love.
I’d like to close with a prayer that Jim Reilly’s friend Sunjeet Singh Randhawa wrote after September 11, 2001. Sunjeet was Jim Reilly’s classmate & friend.
“And I pray for you Jim Reilly. I pray that you are okay, wherever you are. And I pray that if your soul is not on this Earth, that you left it as painlessly as possible. That you left us without fear, that you left us at Peace. And I know that in all the chaos you found a way to smile – because you always did, you always will.”
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