All of us remember this day eight years ago. Sept. 11 is one of those days you just can’t forget. I was in Waco at Baylor. I remember I got up early to meet a friend at the Student Union Building. I didn’t turn on the TV or radio because I didn’t want to wake my roommates. When I got to the SUB, my friend approached me and told me what happened. I thought she was lying. Then I saw a group of students in front of a TV and we stood there and watched as the second plane ran into the towers. The rest of the day was a blur. One professor made us go through class. Another history professor rolled in a TV and said nothing she could teach us about history could compare to Sept. 11. My roommate and I raced to a gas station. The line to get to the pumps stretched down Valley Mills Drive. Friends gathered around our living room TV that night and watched the news. A neighbor’s father, a chaplain, was in the Pentagon on the day of the attack. He was OK but his colleagues weren’t. A friend we knew was also in Afghanistan at the time. A missionary, she’d been captured by the Taliban. It was so surreal.  We were patriotic, praying, scared a little and unsure.  As news came out that the terrorists were Muslim extremist, things changed. My Muslim friends, girls that lived in the same apartment complex with us, said they’d been told to be careful. They were scared to walk to campus alone. I walked with them several times–a whiter face in a sea of brown girls. SUV’s around campus sported phrases like “Kill the towel heads” and my Sri Lankan roommate, a Christian, was spit at in a Wendy’s near campus. They thought she was Arab. It was shocking to hear just how ignorant some people could be. But many tried to act better, to be better than their peers and not shoe polish hate on the back of their SUVs, or blanket all Muslim students on campus as “terrorist evil doers”, and the spitting stopped. But not all bad acts. And here I am, eight years later,  married to a Muslim, fasting, and headed back to Baylor back to Waco this afternoon for the Just Give Me Jesus conference. Full circle? Maybe. I’m a litte nervous to go back on this day. Well, one I haven’t told my mom I’m fasting and two, I’m going to be in a giant stadium surrounded by good Christian folks. I love good Christians, but I’ve seen some really bad ones. And on a day like today, it’s easy to fall back into old patterns of hatred and division–we”ve seen over the last several weeks how badly we all are divided–but I hope not. I hope that we can remember all the victims of 9/11 without a sense of hatred, division or bigotry.