At 5:46 this morning, in the dark at Tempe Beach Park, volunteers began reading names.

They start at 5:46 because that is what time it was here when the first plane hit. Arizona does not change its clocks, so while New York watched it happen at 8:46, most of this state was still asleep. We woke up to a country that had already changed.

Gary Bird had been awake for hours.

He was a Tempe man, 51 years old, and he did not much care for New York. He kept three quarter horses, spent the previous summer training a filly named Dani, and had put a saddle on her for the first time four days earlier. Years before, on a business trip east, he told his wife he felt claustrophobic in Manhattan because he could not see the horizon.

But the offer came on a Friday and they needed him in New York on Monday. He flew out Sunday, did his orientation, and on Tuesday morning walked into a meeting on an upper floor of the World Trade Center that began at 8:15. He never walked out. Gary Bird was the only Arizona resident killed there, one of 2,977 people who did not come home that day.

What most of us actually remember about that morning is not the geopolitics of it. It is the phone calls — what people chose to say when they had 90 seconds and one call to make. Almost nobody used it to talk about their work.

Back in Tempe, Donna Killoughey Bird spent 7 to 10 days hoping her husband would walk out of the rubble. It was her pastor who finally called and asked, gently, whether the family was ready to accept that he was not coming back. She had two teenagers, Amanda and Andrew. She had every reason on earth to be bitter, and she declined. She has gone to Mass at 8:00 every September 11 since, with the same people who came to her house that first morning, and she titled the book she eventually wrote “Nothing Will Separate Us,” after the promise in Romans 8.

Arizona kept paying for that morning long after the news moved on. At Mountain View High School in Tucson, six former students went into the military after Sept. 11 and did not come back. Sam Huff, the drum major, class of 2004, was 18. Three of the six had graduated together.

On a major anniversary it is often worth asking the questions: How are we the same? How are we different? And how have we changed by what we have experienced? In the weeks after Sept. 11, Gallup found that the share of Americans who had attended a service in the previous seven days jumped from a very stable 41 percent to 47 percent. Barna put the surge as high as 25 percent. By early November — eight weeks later — it was back to 40 percent, where it has more or less stayed ever since.

In many ways the surge and decline of interest in the things of God resembles the pattern that repeats throughout the history of the people of Israel in the book of Judges—from catastrophe, the people “cried out to the Lord”; God responds meeting them in their time of need; and the people eventually fall away and do “what is evil in the sight of the Lord.” (e.g. Judges 3:9; 3:12)

Yesterday marked one year since Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking with students at Utah Valley University. He was 31. Eleven days later, tens of thousands of people filled State Farm Stadium in Glendale for his memorial, which by many accounts felt closer to a worship service than a funeral. I was in the stadium, and God’s presence was profound.

And from a stage in our state, his widow said the hardest sentence a human being can say. Erika Kirk quoted Jesus from the cross — Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do — and then said of the young man accused of killing her husband, “I forgive him.” She said she did it because it is what Christ did. She said the answer to hate is not hate.

Many Americans heard Erika’s message. Pastors from Pennsylvania to Colorado began reporting that young adults were turning up on Sunday mornings, some of whom had not been in a pew in years. A Catholic campus ministry working across 250 colleges said it had not spoken to anyone who was not seeing Mass attendance rise. That evidence is anecdotal, and the trend it joined was already underway before last September. But the instinct behind it was precisely the instinct of the autumn of 2001.

So here is the charge, and it did not come from us. Before she left that stage, Erika Kirk turned from the people who had just come to faith toward the ones who already had it, and told them that shepherding those new believers was now their assignment. “Water the seed of their faith, protect it and help it grow,” she said. Notice what that actually asks for. Not a movement, and not a moment. Water, shade, and time, given by somebody standing close enough to notice whether anything is growing. A stadium cannot do that. A household can. A congregation can.

Most of the freshmen who started at the University of Arizona this fall had not been born when the towers fell. They know only what we tell them. Tell them both halves today: what was lost, and what held.

THE FLAGS ARE STANDING NOW

The Exchange Club of Tempe has the Healing Field up at Tempe Beach Park through Sunday — a flag for every life lost. A candlelight vigil is at 7 tonight, the Freedom Concert is Saturday evening, and the Tunnel to Towers 5K steps off Sunday morning.

Psalm 46:1–2 (ESV) — God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way.

ICYMI

Coverage one year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

• Who was Charlie Kirk?
• Turning Point is growing
• What the world didn’t know about Charlie Kirk

In Other News:

• Read how a detransitioner is taking her malpractice fight to the Court of Appeals after North Carolina changed their law
• Read how a trans-activist is arguing that gun violence is the answer to “right-wing extremism” at Northern Arizona University
• Studies show that women are taking the abortion pill well beyond the FDA limit