While taking my morning bike ride, I stopped at the beach.  It was a beautiful morning.  There was no sound, except the waves gently lapping on the shore.  I got off my bike to just "take it all in".  It was about that time that I heard the plane.  It was just a small two-seater, but that sound sent me back ten years.  To a sunny, September Sunday morning.  I was walking down the beach on another island, Hilton Head Island, SC.  The only sounds were the waves gently lapping on the shore...and the sound of the Coast Guard chopper pacing up and down the coastline.  It was the Sunday after 9/11.  The sound of one lonely chopper will be forever in my memory.

This week, I have learned much more about the area in which I now live, a little island called Anna Maria.  There were significant ties to 9/11 in the Sarasota, FL area.  The two terrorists that slammed those planes into the Twin Towers learned to fly about 45 minutes down the road from my house, in Venice.   President Bush was at Booker Elementary in Sarasota when he was told of the attack.  That's about 30 minutes from my front door.  It's easy to forget about these things.  But this week, I saw people interviewed on local tv that most of America will never see.  I saw the man who owns the flight school, the teacher that was seated beside President Bush and several of those students who were reading to him while the World was crashing down.  It really hits home when you see the faces, hear the voices of those, though not at Ground Zero, the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania, played a part in that day.  It makes you realize how that day changed so many more lives than the families and friends of those lost. 

I am grateful for every moment of freedom.  I am grateful for our Troops who defend us.  I am grateful for a God who still protects us.  It is my prayer that none of us ever take any of it for granted again.