Dear friend,
I need to tell you where I was twenty five years ago this morning.
I was at my desk. It was a Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that feels like every other Tuesday until the moment it does not.
Someone came to my door and said turn on the television. And I did. And I watched the second plane hit the tower live. And I sat very still for a very long time afterward because I did not have words for what I had just seen and I have been with the Church for fifty years and I almost always have words.
That morning I did not.
I have been thinking about that morning all week. About what it meant then. About what it means now. About the twenty five years that have passed between that Tuesday and this one and what America looks like on the other side of it.
I want to tell you what I believe God saw that morning. Because I think it is different from what most people have said about it. And I think you need to hear it today of all days.
Before I go further let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I want to tell you why it is relevant to today specifically. Because the same forces that struck America on September 11 2001 are the forces that have been trying to strike it in different ways ever since. And the Biblical pattern of attack and survival and the hand of God working inside the darkest moments is not just a pattern from ancient history. It is the pattern of the last twenty five years. You can find the guide by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me tell you what I believe God saw that morning.
He saw the worst of what human beings are capable of.
Almost three thousand people died that morning. In the towers. In the Pentagon. In a field in Pennsylvania where ordinary people made an extraordinary decision in the last minutes of their lives.
I do not want to move past that too quickly. I do not want to turn September 11 into a theological lesson before I have sat with what it actually was.
It was evil. Real, specific, deliberate, premeditated evil. The kind that looks at a building full of ordinary people going about their ordinary Tuesday and decides that their lives mean nothing compared to a political and religious statement.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. I have sat with the dying. I have sat with the grieving. I have prayed over people carrying things that no human being should have to carry.
What the families of those three thousand people have carried for twenty five years is in that category. And I want to say plainly before I say anything else tonight that I have not forgotten them. I pray for them still. Every September 11 without fail.
God saw what happened to them that morning. He did not look away. He never looks away.
He saw something else too.
In the days after September 11 something happened in America that I have not seen before or since.
The churches filled.
Not the regular attenders coming back. New people. People who had not been inside a church in years. People who had decided that faith was something their parents did and that the modern world had moved past it. They came back. In enormous numbers. With genuine hunger. With the specific desperate need of people who had just been shown that the world was more dangerous and more fragile and more in need of something solid than they had been willing to admit.
They came looking for God.
In Second Chronicles chapter 7 verse 14 God made a promise that I have returned to more times than I can count.
If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
For a brief moment after September 11 America humbled itself. It prayed. It sought something beyond itself. The arrogance of a nation that had decided it did not need God was shaken loose by a single Tuesday morning.
And the churches filled.
What happened next.
Within a year the churches had emptied again.
Not all of them. Not everywhere. But the hunger that September 11 produced was not sustained. The humility did not hold. The nation that had briefly turned toward God turned back toward itself. Back toward the comfort and the confidence and the self-sufficiency that the towers falling had interrupted for a season.
I have thought about that for twenty five years.
About what it means that America was given a moment of genuine spiritual hunger and chose not to stay in it long enough for it to produce what it was capable of producing.
About what God does with a nation that is offered a door and walks up to it and then turns away.
In Amos chapter 4 God described exactly this pattern with Israel. He listed the specific disasters He had sent. The famine. The drought. The plague. The destruction of cities. And after each one He said the same thing.
Yet you have not returned to me.
Yet you have not returned to me.
The disasters were not punishment for its own sake. They were invitations. Urgent, painful, impossible to ignore invitations to return to the God who had made the nation and sustained it and could restore it.
And Israel kept not returning.
I think about America on September 12 2001. The full churches. The flags. The unity. The hunger. The specific window of a nation that had been shaken loose from its self-sufficiency and was reaching for something real.
And I think about what we did with that window.
What I believe God wants America to do today.
Not to relive the grief. Grief has its place but it is not a destination.
Not to perform patriotism. Flags and ceremonies are not the same as the return that Second Chronicles describes.
I believe God wants America to ask honestly — twenty five years later — whether the window that September 11 opened is still open.
Whether the humility that filled the churches for a season is available again. Not because of another disaster. Because of a deliberate choice. The choice that Second Chronicles describes. Humble yourself. Pray. Seek my face. Turn from your wicked ways.
That is not a complicated instruction. It is a costly one. Because humility is always costly for a nation that has decided it does not need to be humble.
But the promise attached to it is extraordinary.
I will hear from heaven. I will forgive their sin. I will heal their land.
Heal their land.
Not make it more comfortable. Not make it more powerful. Heal it. The specific word for restoration after damage. For the return of something that was lost. For the closing of a wound that has been open for twenty five years.
I want to tell you one more thing before I close.
The man who was in the White House on September 11 2001 was George W. Bush. He stood on the rubble of the towers with a bullhorn and said the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
The man who is in the White House today has spent the last decade being attacked with every weapon his enemies could find. Courts. Impeachments. Bullets. Betrayals from inside his own party. And he is still standing.
I do not think that is unconnected to September 11. I think the last twenty five years of American history are one continuous story. A story about a nation that was struck and survived. That was offered a door and did not walk through it far enough. That has been attacked from outside and from within. That has produced in this specific moment a man who by every natural measure should not still be standing.
And yet he is.
I wrote about that pattern in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. The same God who watched the towers fall and watched the churches fill and watched America turn away again is the same God who I believe is working in this moment. Through this man. Toward something that the last twenty five years have been building toward whether we recognized it or not.
Read it today if you can: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Not as a distraction from September 11. As the next chapter of the same story.
I want to close with the field in Pennsylvania.
Flight 93. The plane that did not reach its target because ordinary people made an extraordinary decision in the last minutes of their lives.
They knew they were going to die. They voted. They said let's roll. And they took the plane down before it could be used to kill thousands more.
I think about them every September 11. About what it cost them. About what it produced. About the specific kind of courage that shows up when ordinary people decide that some things are worth more than their own survival.
That courage did not die in that field. It is in this country still. In the people reading this letter tonight. In the ones who have been paying attention when everyone else looked away. In the ones who are still standing after everything that has been thrown at them.
Let's roll is not just a rallying cry from twenty five years ago. It is a description of what faithful people do when the moment requires it.
The moment still requires it.
God bless you, friend. I am thinking of the three thousand today. And I am thinking of you.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
Today I want you to do three things:
One. Take five minutes today to pray specifically for the families of the three thousand who died on September 11 2001. Not generally. Specifically. Ask God to give them peace that has not fully come yet. Ask Him to heal what twenty five years has not been able to heal on its own.
Two. Read Second Chronicles chapter 7 verse 14 today. Just that one verse. Read it as a personal invitation not a national policy. Humble yourself. Pray. Seek His face. Turn. Let it be something you do today not something you wait for the nation to do first.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him today: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Twenty five years after the towers fell America is still in a story that God has not finished writing. That guide will help you see where we are in it.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.