Myrna, Kristina, and an Afghan woman, together in friendship working for peaceful tomorrows

Something had struck one of the twin towers in New York. I got out of bed having heard that on the radio and went into the living room and turned on the TV. As I watched and listened to some TV news-people, I saw the second plane strike. Surely something terrible must be wrong…. radar systems must have gone crazy….. they’ve got to get all the planes out of the air and on the ground…. someone’s got to do something. Within an hour or so, we all knew that our nation had suffered a horrible attack.

Little did I know that within months, I would find myself sitting with two women who had lost loved ones on September 11th, and Afghans who had lost loved ones, lost homes, or had been maimed, in the world’s response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our interfaith peace delegation sat in the rubble of Afghanistan and we shared our pain, our loss, our fear, and our hopes for a more peaceful tomorrow.

Pictured above are Rev. Myrna Bethke, pastor of a Methodist church in New Jersey, who lost her brother in the World Trade Center, and Kristina Marie Olsen, a nurse and singer from Massachusetts, who had a sister who died on American Flight 11.

They came to Afghanistan as members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, on a delegation organized by Global Exchange. Despite their loss, they had only love and compassion for the Afghans we met.

Among the many things we did in Afghanistan, one of the most memorable was a worship service we held in Kabul, where we combined rubble from Afghanistan with symbols of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. We surrounded that shrine, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and we prayed for peace using Christian scripture, Jewish Psalms, and passages from the Koran. Despite any cultural, religious, racial, gender, or other inward or outward differences, we were unified in our pain, our loss, our desire to share our stories with each other, and our desperate need for peace.

Kristina with a child at a "displaced persons" camp in Afghanistan

Today, I remember that terrible morning of September 11th, those amazing days together in Afghanistan where we began a long process of healing, and I pray for comfort for all those who suffered loss, all those who still suffer – all those empty chairs at dinner tables, all those who have suffered since through our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I pray that we find a way to create peaceful tomorrows out of our war-weary past.

I especially hold Myrna and Kristina in my prayers.