Bethany Village Pastor Bob Ashburn reflects on the  anniversary of 9/11 with this message to the campus community:

September 11, 2011 is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. I remember I was home in Sarasota, Florida, watching the local news coverage of President Bush interacting with students at a Sarasota elementary school. At first, we didn’t know what happened in New York. Then, we were all shocked to find out that terrorists were hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

Over 2,900 people died in those attacks and it changed this country’s belief that we are safe within our borders. This resulted in the passage of the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act in the following months. I was hit hard, as I had watched those World Trade towers as they were being built in the 1970’s while I was attending high school in New York. Then I found out that one of my college friends, Debbie Kaplan, was killed in the World Trade Center collapse. Debbie was an engineer and had just gone back to work part-time about a month earlier as she felt she no longer needed to be a stay-at-home mom for her children. So, now it wasn’t just an attack upon buildings; it was an attack upon people - real people - and not just names on a list.

And, ten years after these attacks, we remember the first responders, the firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who saved countless others from death that day, some at the cost of their own lives. We also remember how we have recovered and rebuilt in these ten years. Despite the terrorist destruction of buildings and the death of people, our American spirit has never been defeated!

God’s blessings,
Pastor Bob