World Trade Center – is it too soon for a movie?

I saw ‘World Trade Center‘ a couple of days ago and thought that Stone did a pretty good job considering the eggshells of controversy he had to walk on to film it.

My only fear going into it was that it was going to be another ‘Flag waving God Bless America good old boy gung ho tearjerker of a movie’ and was pleased to see that it wasn’t any of that. There were no political undertones, no conspiracy theories, and no sensationalism; there is even a brief montage of world citizenry glued to television sets displaying looks of concern as they watch on the reports of the attacks on CNN. Stone knows full well — he pointed it out during the famous Alice Tully Hall panel in October 2001 — which a large swath of humanity, from Greece to Gaza, erupted into a spontaneous dance party upon hearing the news of the hit on America, yet Stone omitted these scenes.

The movie took me back to the morning of September 11. I walked to work and even after hearing about the planes crashing into the towers, I went about my normal tasks. I didn’t feel very affected by the crash or the crumbling of the buildings; everything seemed so far away from me. I don’t aim at downplaying the horror of the event, and the pain that went far beyond lives that were lost that day, but it was the stories of individuals who should have been in the towers, but were not that really resonated with me.

The story of a woman who felt devastated after being fired from her job in the 64th floor of tower 1 the day before the attacks, the man who was never late to work and on this day for the firs time his alarm didn’t wake him. There were dozens of barely-missed saved by chance stories, and I have heard some people say that these folks were very lucky. I happen to disagree with them, see I look at luck in the same way an atheist looks at God. I believe that these people were not saved by luck, but by the stealthy workings of God. I can already hear the cynical ask “does this mean God decided not to save those who died?” I can’t really tell you for sure what God was doing or not doing in the lives of all those who tragically died. However, I can tell you from witnessing lives touched and transformed as a missionary and from events like these, that God sometimes does intervene in peoples lives in dramatic ways, other times in subtle ways, and sometimes what we see as misfortune is really a blessing — as cliché as that may sound.

I have to reflect on how many times I have felt like life handed me the short end of the stick after whacking me around with it a while and how many times I have cried out “Woe is me”, not realizing that my misfortune was a way of God keeping me from danger, either spiritual or physical. I suspect that someday we will know how much God intervened in our lives, I also suspect that we will feel humbled to know how much God was involved in much of what we attribute to “luck” or “misfortune” and how blessed we are to have a God who loves us in spite of us.