Sept 11, 13 years later.

As I was doing my morning walk after getting my daughter on the bus, I began to listen to the office of readings. My mind began to wander as the Psalms were being read to me, and I began to meditate sincerely on this set of verses: 

O Lord, you have been our refuge

from one generation to the next.

Before the mountains were born

or the earth or the world brought forth,

you are God, without beginning or end.

You turn men back into dust

and say: “Go back, sons of men.”

To your eyes a thousand years

are like yesterday, come and gone,

no more than a watch in the night.

You sweep men away like a dream,

like grass which springs up in the morning.

In the morning it springs up and flowers:

by evening it withers and fades.

How fleeting mankind is, from moment to moment. The universe we believe to be billions of years old. Mankind itself thousands and thousands of years. The life of a tree in the multiple hundreds of years, the life of turtles and some reptiles beyond our capacity. Yet we have an inflated sense of ego. We believe we are so much more important than everything else, as if God saw something in us that deserved his love. Those who claim we cannot merit God's love, then seem to feel that somehow they earned it, by being man.

How little we truly are in comparison to the expanse of the universe, how fleeting we are. I pondered how that grass grows every year, but it's a new blade, the old having withered and died. The root is the same, but the blade is refreshed, new cells, new life. Much like humanity that continues on with or without us, blades that may or may not be remembered in the breath of time. Yet God loves us. What is man then that God is mindful of us? We don't deserve it. We are just grains of sand on a beach of time, being washed in and out of the shore. Will anyone remember me 10 years after I am gone? 20? 100? Or will I like the countless others be simply another leaf that has fallen from the tree of life, gone on into eternity but forgotten here. 

These are my thoughts on the memorial of 9/11... what are yours?