Fifteen minutes after our prayer meeting at work, where it was announced we were allowed to go home, we had another meeting, where we were required to go home. The combination fo the remote danger (highrise in a major city) and the fact that nothing was getting done anyway, they decided to close. This was about 10:30. The Federal Building and most of the highrises were being volunatarily evacuated, and the streets were quite crowded considering it was no longer rush hour but not yet lunch hour. The mid-day light rail was more crowded than a rush-hour train. Some people on the radio had likened the shock to the American people to the day Kennedy was shot, and I though of that as the train passed the school book depository and passed over the grassy knoll. There were so many people leaving downtown that there was an extra suburban train scheduled, and it was full.

We Americans have always had a sense of security, clearly false. I wonder how anything this massive could have been undertaken with absolutely no warning. Where was the CIA?

On the way home, a woman noticed a bag left on the train. She was very nervous. We all chuckled with her, noting that any other day it would have been clearly a bag of trash to be disgusted at. She said she thought her days of suspecting everything were over when she left Ireland. Welcome to the real world, America.

I live two miles from one of the country's busiest airports. It is eerily silent today, no jets roaring overhead as usual.

I wondered where in the world all those planes were going to land. I half expected to see a 747 in my parking lot when I pulled up! Thank you, Canada!

A recurrent theme in my Sunday School class has been how much America has been turning away from God over the last decades. Now we will turn to God, because He is the only One who can be turned to at devastating times like this.