Each Day Already is a Challenge

These things I ponder

I have shared this before, but it relates to my Thursday ponderings.

I started working at a mid-sized newspaper in Texas about six weeks before Sept. 11, 2001 and immediately I wondered why I was there and if I had done that stupid thing I had done before. You know...charging ahead before God had revealed what He wanted me to do. There was so much fussing in the newsroom and God was so obviously absent from the employees and from the news, that I found it hard to go to work some mornings.

That's when I began - again - waking very early in the mornings so that I could watch the sun rise and listen to the birds as they began their morning worship. I enjoyed watching the squirrels romp. And my spirit was quieted enough to join the chaos I knew I would face each day.

I was glad that that I had the newsroom to myself each day for about two to three hours. I was able to review and plan what I needed to do without interruption, at least from other employees. But I soon realized that the longer I was there, the more the newsroom phone rang in those early morning hours. Even the receptionist noticed it.

When I first started at the newspaper, I was the editorial assistant. A big part of my job was reading all of the letters to the editor and recommending to the managing editor which ones we should print. He also read them all, but he and the publisher soon came to trust my judgement on what should be published. Yes, we disagreed sometimes, but I won more than I lost.

It was also my job, once we had decided upon letters to be published, to contact the writers to make sure we had their permission to print. Most letters had to be edited. People - like me! - tend to use far too many words than necessary, and we did have a limit to the number of words allowed in each letter or guest column. (Guest columns were allowed more words than regular letters to the editor, but still had a limit.)

Before I arrived, the managing editor did all the editing of the letters, and he often angered the writers by how he did that. After I started, I was allowed to edit some, and I usually got the task of editing anything from pastors, churches or Christians. At first, folks didn't trust me to edit their letters any more than they did the managing editor. They really wanted to do it themselves. But try as they might, they usually could not get their 750 word letters down to the required 300 words or less. Often, they would be ready to give up rather than have their words and message destroyed. Then, I would gently ask if I might try. I would work on their letters, then email a copy to them, and they would usually be pleased (and surprised) with the result.

These folks, many of them regular letter writers (have you ever noticed that? Letters to the editor are often written by the same people over and over again...), were the ones also calling me early each morning. Even with these affirmations, though, I still wondered what purpose I served and why I had thought God was all for me working at the newspaper.

One thing that our newspaper did not publish was poetry, even though we got at least three or four poems - about current events - each week. I had the task of letting people know that we just could not publish poetry. Sometimes, the poems would have been ideal for addressing a particular issue, but the editor and publisher stood firm on this rule.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. I arrived a bit later than I should have that day. I had trouble getting out of bed, and when I did I turned on the news. I really didn't want to leave my living room, then, but knew that I had to. I sped down the highway to work and, as usual, turned on the newsroom TV's as I entered. I beckoned the people in the classified sales department through the glass that separated us, knowing that they would want to see the news being shown. Shortly after they all stood behind me watching the New York scene, the second plane hit.

Thirty minutes later, the managing editor arrived and asked that I contact every reporter and photragrapher whether or not they were scheduled to work. Even before they all gathered, he had me calling banks and government offices to see if they had done anything to change their security measures. Naturally, they wouldn't really share much about that.

Everyone in the newsroom became reporters that day, even our part time file clerk. We all gathered quotes and information from local people. As a mid-sized local paper, we didn't try to compete with larger regional or national news media. Our focus was on how this affected the local people and businesses.

As I spoke to one small town local mayor, she and I prayed together over the phone. I noticed that the newsroom noice quieted as we prayed and when I hung up the phone, the reporter behind me said, "Hey, I'm a Christian. How come no one wants to pray with me? Why is it that whether you call a banker, the post office or one of the town halls, you end up praying? Here, call this business and see if the owner prays with you." And so I did. And, yes, we prayed too.

It was then, I think, that I figured out why I was working in the newsroom at that time and place.

So why am I pondering about this today? Well...

Even though we had a hard and fast rule about never, ever publishing poetry, that changed for a while after 9/11. The poems started coming in and we started publishing them every Sunday. For weeks, we printed two full pages of poems every Sunday. Without ever telling the public that our policy had changed, the poems just started coming in droves. Without much discussion in the newsroom, we decided that our readers needed to vent and share in the only way they felt they could. And many who had never written a poem in their lives, did so after Sept. 11 and submitted them to the newspaper.

When tragedy occurs, people write poetry.

When President Kennedy died when I was in the 6th grade, I wrote a poem about it.
When the Challenger accident happened, I wrote a poem about it.
When kids were shot at Columbine, I wrote a poem about it.
(I don't have any of these.)

When Sept. 11 happened, I wrote a poem about it. "Tumbled Towers, Humbled Hearts" 

When the Columbia accident happened, I wrote a poem about it. "Shuttled Home" 

So why couldn't I write one about the Virginia Tech massacre? Is it because I cannot cry? "The "eyes" have it"