Like others, I still remember where I was when I heard what happened eight years ago–at the beginning of my senior year at Messiah College. It was a Tuesday morning and Tuesday mornings were our time for all-inclusive chapels (several chapel options were available on Thursdays). I think my roommate had been watching something about it on the news, but I hadn’t paid too much attention and didn’t realize what had happened. Then they made the announcement in chapel. Then my classes were canceled that day. In one of the lecture halls, the professor put down the video screen and had CNN playing. “You can stay if you want,” he told us, “but you don’t have to.”

I had been “on a break” with the girl I had dated prior to meeting my wife. After the events of 9/11 [in addition to the other crashes, the crash in Somerset County, Pa. was significant for our Pennsylvania school], this girl and I “took a break from the break” and spent more time together for comfort. It finally “officially” ended within a month, but we just needed each other’s support for a little while to get through the emotional impact of that day.

Perhaps the most influential result of 9/11 for me was the time that we spent reflecting upon it in a course I took on kingship in ancient Israel with Gordon Brubacher. We spent a ton of time discussing the issues of kingship, more so than the specifics of particular kings. We talked about how the people demanded a king when God told them they didn’t need one. We reflected upon the desire for and corruption of power, the neglect of social justice, the alignment with unsavory characters, the use of violence, the powerful forgetting that God is the true king.

All the while, our unabashed social activist professor had us considering many of the underlying global issues related to the events of 9/11. Do they really “hate our freedom”? Is war the appropriate response? When it seemed the entire country gave their unwavering support to President Bush and his rhetoric of sanctified violence, I became a member of what seemed to be (at that time) a tiny minority who questioned our country’s knee jerk reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

The events of 9/11 served as a catalyst for so many to begin to follow the news and become informed. I was one of those people. But not only that. The combination of such information with the deep reflections on Israelite kingship had a transformative effect upon a social awareness in my own faith.

I believe those things are what firmed up my commitment to Anabaptism.

Update: See also reflections from Jim, John, and Ben.