July 18, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, stories of survival and of loss echoed through communities and the world after the Oklahoma City bombing... and after 9/11. Jack Poe shares a police chaplain's perspective on faith, resilience and hope - and how people wracked by one disaster spoke into the lives of other victims.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. On April nineteenth,
nineteen ninety five, a rider rental truck pulled in front
of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Within minutes, it exploded, killing one hundred and sixty eight men, women,
and children, a senseless act of domestic terrorism. Here to
(00:31):
tell the story of surviving, finding hope through unspeakable tragedy
and what he calls the Oklahoma standard is Jack Poe,
who was a chaplain for the Oklahoma City Police Department
at the time. Take it away, Jack.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
We were getting ready to go to a funeral. One
of our officers had lost his father and the funeral
was that day and we usually try to make those
funerals for the family. And so we were getting ready
and we heard this what it was, an explosion eight
and a half miles away. It shook our house, and
(01:06):
I thought something happened in the back of the house.
She thought something happened in the kitchen where I was.
So we kind of ran the middle of the house.
Now it wasn't the house. House is okay, What in
the world was that? Well, first thought was it's an
airplane crash. So I went out, turned my radio on,
(01:26):
police radio on, and then discovered what had happened. I
was downtown within fifteen minutes, twenty intermost and I could
see the smoke coming up. But you don't know. The
first thing I thought is a boiler might have exploded.
You don't think about bomb. So I turned up to
(01:50):
go to the Federal Building and at least five blocks
around that building, all the glasses out, cars are just crumbled.
I couldn't believe it. That building, third of it's gone.
Our guys from Vietnam, when they came out and smelled
ammonia nitrate, they knew it was a bomb. We're gonna
(02:12):
have a lot of fatalities. We might have lost some officers.
So I started looking for our officer at walks a
beat down around the Federal Building. And it's probably an
hour or so later before I ran into him. And
I walked up to him and he grabbed me. They
don't normally do that, they're stand office. That kind of
(02:33):
surprised me. He said, you know, I have two children
in the nursery. My knees just almost buckle. And he said, well,
they got up this morning and they didn't feel good,
and mama kept them went home and I said, thank you, Lord.
(02:56):
I said, what about yourself? He says, well, I have
coffee in this building at nine o'clock every day, and
he said, I got up to go to work this morning,
and the kids had the car last night, and when
I started to work, he had drawn all the gas
out of it, and I had stopped to get gas.
And I said, I'm glad you're okay, but I knew
(03:16):
a lot of people weren't going to be okay. Secret
Service lost six people that day. They lost four agents
and two support people, and Mickey was one of them.
I got acquainted with him because they having issues. And
one of our lieutenants said, would you go visit Mickey
Maroney in the hospital. He's a Secret Service agent. Says
(03:37):
something's wrong with him and what it is, it doesn't
look good. Would you go see him. I said, yeah,
I'll go see him. And that's when I found out
he was from Arkansas. I'm from Arkansas. We talked about
the resume, so we came pretty close. That was really tough,
you know. I didn't cry after the bombing because he
got to stay focused. We had to stay in the present.
(03:58):
We had work to do. I did his service, and
I walked back to my car and one of the
agents came up and we visited, and I started crying.
This first time I cried. I just couldn't hold it back.
We just floodgates open. So you get dressed and you
go back down. You try to finish what you're doing.
(04:20):
And it was kind of hard because two things happened. One,
I was the state chaplain of the National Guard, so
we mobilized all of our chaplains to go down and
to work at the site, some of them and some
of them to work with the families. So I had
to take care of that responsibility, plus the responsibility of
our officers who were down there. So we were kind
(04:42):
of busy for a while. But it brought together some
people that I would have never met had not been
for the bombing. There was a bonding of Oklahoma City
that was we called it the Oklahoma Standard. A friend
of mine came up from Atlanta. It was sitting down
in our wrist area Chapel's corner one day and the
(05:05):
governor shows up. They visited for a while. He didn't
who the governor was, you know, and so he said
we came to Oklahoma City, and he said, we got here.
They prepared meals for us. The Oklahoma Restaurant Association was
getting ready to have their meeting in Oklahoma City. They
had all their equipment and stuff there. Those chefs just
(05:27):
broke the stuff open start feeding. And so we had
a place at the Myriad where we kept a lot
of the people that came in to help us. We
had cots form, we had meals form. There's people that
cut their hair, that took their cleaning, did their cleaning.
I mean, it's just unbelievable how people pitched in. And
(05:50):
so he told my friend, he says, reached in his
pocket and he pulled out a dollar bill and he says, says,
this is an Oklahoma dollar. Says, you can't spend it here.
So when my friend was talking to Keaty, the governor,
he took one out of his pocket and told him
the story the dollar. So Keaty took the dollar and
rode on an official Oklahoma dollar Frank Keaty, Governor of
(06:13):
the State of Oklahoma, and gave it to our friend.
So he showed it to me and he says, since
that's an Oklahoma state dollar, you can't spend it, so
you need to give it to me. No, mo, I'm
taking taking that back anyway. But that's how we call
the standard because our people responded and we had no
crime for about four days. If we said we needed something,
(06:36):
truckloads came in. And when you talk about the generosity
of the people, stories that never get told. On a
second night, John came back again. He was in charge
of the response team that worked a perimeter to make
(06:57):
sure everything was clear. He uh, I gotta tell you
this story. I said, all right, John, what is it?
He says? He said, we were down at the corner
and he says, this car pulls up the parks across
the street we're watching. He said, these these two ladies
got out. It was an old car, looked like it
(07:18):
was held together with duck tape and bob bar. I mean,
it says no car. But they came over to us
and they're carrying these two plastic sacks and they said
to us officers, we understood that the kids need diapers
and milk. He said, you know, we don't have a
whole lot of money. And John says, you tell it
didn't have a whole lot of money, said, we don't
(07:40):
have a whole lot of money. But we got up
early this morning and we've been moying lawns all day long.
And the money we made from mowing lawns, we bought
what we could of diapers and milk. Could you see
that the kids got this. She gave what she had,
and that's why people did. They gave what they had.
(08:02):
The spirit moved our people to do great things. So
we call that the Oklahoma standard now, and we use
that quite a bit when we're talking about responded like
we responded to New York. We talked about the Oklahoma standard.
But we learned some lessons. The first lesson I learned
was the first knight of the bombing, one of our
(08:25):
lieutenants came to me and he says, chaplain, I have
a verse for Oklahoma CEA And so John, I said, Okay,
what's that verse? He says, it's Psalms thirty four eighteen.
God is near the broken hearted and saves those who
are Christian spirit. John, that's pretty good because hearts are
(08:49):
broken and spirits are crushed. We need that verse. So
we carried that verse.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And you've been listening to Jack Poe, who was a
chaplain for the Oklahoma City Police Department at the time
of America is still worst domestic terrorism attack of all time.
When we come back more of Jack Poe and his
story the Oklahoma City bombing and after here on our
American stories, and we returned to our American stories and
(09:41):
with Jack Poe's story. Jack served as a chaplain for
the Oklahoma City Police Department in nineteen ninety five when
the Alfred P. Murror Building was destroyed in an act
of domestic terrorism. We now turned to another tragedy thirteen
hundred and twenty four miles away from Oklahoma City and
how Jack lent his services there.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Take it away, Jack. So on nine to eleven, we
finish our Bible study and one of our participants works
for the FBI, and I get a call. She says,
it's your TV on in the office. We have a TV.
He wasn't on. She said, no, go turn it on.
(10:25):
I said, go turn it on. Said the plane has
flown into the World Trade Center. So I immediately go
turn on the TV. I see the first plane. They're
showing it again coming in to one of the buildings.
I'm thinking, okay, this clear sky, there's no you know,
(10:48):
somebody get like, what you know, I'm thinking the small plane.
I'm not thinking of a large plane field with a
full tank of gas. But you should have when you
look at it and we see the other plane come in,
and I can tell you at that time my heart,
(11:08):
my heart broke anyway when we saw the first plane
go in. But when the second plane went in, we
knew what one bomb did to us, what two buildings
being hit would do. There's gonna be a lot of casualties,
number one, innocent people who went to work today like
we did April the nineteenth, and had no idea what
(11:29):
was going to happen at nine o two. And I
knew we're probably going to lose some first responders. I knew.
So New York called and asked for the chaplains that
worked the World Building to come to New York Town.
They wanted some experience from us on how you'd handle it.
What did we discover that worked and didn't work. We
(11:53):
packed and we were getting ready to go, and of
course we'd already found out that there's no planes. But
there was a gentleman in Enid, Oklahoma, who had a
subsidiary of their company in New Jersey. I don't know
for sure what they did. I think chemical. Anyway, there's
four brothers that operated now, so one of the brothers
(12:15):
came to ENID every week they switched off. Well, of
course he gets a call from his wife. It says,
you need to come home. So he calls his pilot,
get the jet and come get him. Need to come home, Sir,
I can't. I can't do it. Why can't you do it? Well,
plans are grounded, nobody's doing anything, and he's thinking to himself.
(12:38):
My wife says come home. So he got ahold of
FAA and said, I need to get home. We understand
there's some people that they're asking to come to New
York from Oklahoma City. Can we make this a angel
flight and get them to New York? And Federal Aviation says,
we'll do that. So he paid for the plane, He
(13:02):
paid for the other pilot, He bought all the gas.
He came to Oklahoma City, picked us up, and we
flew to New York. When we landed and got on
the ground, they fueled our played. People asked you what
you do in flying? I was supposed to be up there.
I can imagine we had a lot of a lot
of planes watching us. But anyway, that's how we got
(13:25):
to New York on the flight, and so that started
our first about eighteen days. At ground zero. You see television,
but when you get on site, it's not the same thing.
And I remember I went around there for the first
time and it was dark. All the lights are shining
(13:46):
on it, and you see all the debris that's there,
and I thought to myself, then this looks like I've
seen out of Hollywood. And one of the guys says,
it's real. This is not Hollywood. When we got down
(14:09):
there and they got we got with Leo Flanagan. He
said you all chaplains. We said, yes, what can we
help you with? He says, we need some chaplains over
here to temporary more. I will tell you this, and
that really surprised me. When they brought in bucket of
bones to the medical examiner who was there, he did
(14:30):
not touch that until we prayed over him. He'd say,
all right, chaplains, let's pray. So we prayed over every
one of those buckets of whatever was brought in. I
think that was probably one of the toughest parts, was
to work at more and to see people coming by
wondering if could have identified any of their loved ones
(14:53):
that they knew were probably dead, or did we find
a gun or a badge or something to identify that
this might have been one of our loved ones. You
ask for God's help. We knew it was worse than
Oklahoma City, but I think our mind as chaplains was
(15:17):
what are we Therefore we're not out there to do
rescue work? Why have we showed up that kind of
grabs that your gut. You don't know, but I can't
tell you how many times officers have says to me,
it's gonna be okay because the chaplains here, we bring
to that situation, to that table something that nobody else
(15:38):
can bring. Hope, it's gonna be okay. The Chaplain's here,
which means God's here. You know what we say to people,
There's two rules in life. Number one is, bad things happen.
Bad things happen to good people, and bad things happen
to bad people. And God is not a respect to
a person's The rainfalls on the justice the unjust. And
(16:02):
rule number two is you can't change real number one.
That's life. But we can make a choice on how
we're going to deal with it. That's the key. People
have a choice to make. They can be a victim
or they can be a survivor. Victims focus on what
they can't change. Survivors focus on what they can now.
(16:23):
There's some people like to be victims, but victims get
you nowhere after a while. But when we get there,
we just want to meet people where they are, not
where they hope they are, but where they are, and
just to be a presence. It's a ministry of prisons,
(16:45):
and so I think that helped us was to know
that if we could meet with those people, shared some
things that we have gone through in Oklahoma City, to
tell the stories of survivors, maybe they would gain home.
And some of them did. One of the gentlemen I
(17:06):
met at kay I said, we had this group that
came up on our anniversary, and we sent a group
on their anniversary, and we were having dinner one evening
and they were telling their stories to us, and so
one of the gentlemen said, I lost my son. Said
he called me on the phone and he says, Dad,
(17:29):
soulful heart in here said. We talked for a while,
and he says, people are jumping out of the window.
Talked a little bit more, and he says, Dad, the
phone smelting. That was it. He said, you know I'd
lost my son. There's no doubt I'd lost my son.
(17:54):
Said two choices to make, he said. I went into
my study and I got my Bible. He said, I
could tear it up and throw it in the trash.
Or I could open it up and understand that God
is nearly broken hearted and save those who are Christian spirit,
(18:16):
and I can let his words speak to me, he
says in journeys. It's tough, but I have to make
that choice. I can open it up, let the Spirit
speak to me, Let the spirit guide me to know
that life's going on. My son. Wos want life to
(18:37):
go on. We're going to grievous loss, there's no doubt
about that, but it's not going to parison our future,
cause we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
Paul said, I could do all things through Christ, who
gives me strength. That's where my strength and hope is
(18:58):
not in the event it took place, not the fact
that I've lost a son. My hope is as God
promises that he walk with us to the very end.
So we make that choice, you know, And I can't
make it for other people. They have to make it
(19:18):
for themselves. But I can say to them those that
have chosen to be a survivor rather than the victim,
though the road has been hard, away ahead of the
people that want to be a victim. So I think,
as chaplains, we have that opportunity to bring hope to
a hopeless world, to say life isn't fair, never has
(19:43):
been fair, but God has promised to be our journey mate.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And a terrific job and the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery and Katrina Heine, a contributor
to Our American Stories, the story of Jack po doriv
a chaplain's response to tragedy in his community, and others
here on Our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. On April nineteenth,
nineteen ninety five, a rider rental truck pulled in front
of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Within minutes, it exploded, killing one hundred and sixty eight men, women,
and children, a senseless act of domestic terrorism. Here to
(00:31):
tell the story of surviving, finding hope through unspeakable tragedy
and what he calls the Oklahoma standard is Jack Poe,
who was a chaplain for the Oklahoma City Police Department
at the time. Take it away, Jack.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
We were getting ready to go to a funeral. One
of our officers had lost his father and the funeral
was that day and we usually try to make those
funerals for the family. And so we were getting ready
and we heard this what it was, an explosion eight
and a half miles away. It shook our house, and
(01:06):
I thought something happened in the back of the house.
She thought something happened in the kitchen where I was.
So we kind of ran the middle of the house.
Now it wasn't the house. House is okay, What in
the world was that? Well, first thought was it's an
airplane crash. So I went out, turned my radio on,
(01:26):
police radio on, and then discovered what had happened. I
was downtown within fifteen minutes, twenty intermost and I could
see the smoke coming up. But you don't know. The
first thing I thought is a boiler might have exploded.
You don't think about bomb. So I turned up to
(01:50):
go to the Federal Building and at least five blocks
around that building, all the glasses out, cars are just crumbled.
I couldn't believe it. That building, third of it's gone.
Our guys from Vietnam, when they came out and smelled
ammonia nitrate, they knew it was a bomb. We're gonna
(02:12):
have a lot of fatalities. We might have lost some officers.
So I started looking for our officer at walks a
beat down around the Federal Building. And it's probably an
hour or so later before I ran into him. And
I walked up to him and he grabbed me. They
don't normally do that, they're stand office. That kind of
(02:33):
surprised me. He said, you know, I have two children
in the nursery. My knees just almost buckle. And he said, well,
they got up this morning and they didn't feel good,
and mama kept them went home and I said, thank you, Lord.
(02:56):
I said, what about yourself? He says, well, I have
coffee in this building at nine o'clock every day, and
he said, I got up to go to work this morning,
and the kids had the car last night, and when
I started to work, he had drawn all the gas
out of it, and I had stopped to get gas.
And I said, I'm glad you're okay, but I knew
(03:16):
a lot of people weren't going to be okay. Secret
Service lost six people that day. They lost four agents
and two support people, and Mickey was one of them.
I got acquainted with him because they having issues. And
one of our lieutenants said, would you go visit Mickey
Maroney in the hospital. He's a Secret Service agent. Says
(03:37):
something's wrong with him and what it is, it doesn't
look good. Would you go see him. I said, yeah,
I'll go see him. And that's when I found out
he was from Arkansas. I'm from Arkansas. We talked about
the resume, so we came pretty close. That was really tough,
you know. I didn't cry after the bombing because he
got to stay focused. We had to stay in the present.
(03:58):
We had work to do. I did his service, and
I walked back to my car and one of the
agents came up and we visited, and I started crying.
This first time I cried. I just couldn't hold it back.
We just floodgates open. So you get dressed and you
go back down. You try to finish what you're doing.
(04:20):
And it was kind of hard because two things happened. One,
I was the state chaplain of the National Guard, so
we mobilized all of our chaplains to go down and
to work at the site, some of them and some
of them to work with the families. So I had
to take care of that responsibility, plus the responsibility of
our officers who were down there. So we were kind
(04:42):
of busy for a while. But it brought together some
people that I would have never met had not been
for the bombing. There was a bonding of Oklahoma City
that was we called it the Oklahoma Standard. A friend
of mine came up from Atlanta. It was sitting down
in our wrist area Chapel's corner one day and the
(05:05):
governor shows up. They visited for a while. He didn't
who the governor was, you know, and so he said
we came to Oklahoma City, and he said, we got here.
They prepared meals for us. The Oklahoma Restaurant Association was
getting ready to have their meeting in Oklahoma City. They
had all their equipment and stuff there. Those chefs just
(05:27):
broke the stuff open start feeding. And so we had
a place at the Myriad where we kept a lot
of the people that came in to help us. We
had cots form, we had meals form. There's people that
cut their hair, that took their cleaning, did their cleaning.
I mean, it's just unbelievable how people pitched in. And
(05:50):
so he told my friend, he says, reached in his
pocket and he pulled out a dollar bill and he says, says,
this is an Oklahoma dollar. Says, you can't spend it here.
So when my friend was talking to Keaty, the governor,
he took one out of his pocket and told him
the story the dollar. So Keaty took the dollar and
rode on an official Oklahoma dollar Frank Keaty, Governor of
(06:13):
the State of Oklahoma, and gave it to our friend.
So he showed it to me and he says, since
that's an Oklahoma state dollar, you can't spend it, so
you need to give it to me. No, mo, I'm
taking taking that back anyway. But that's how we call
the standard because our people responded and we had no
crime for about four days. If we said we needed something,
(06:36):
truckloads came in. And when you talk about the generosity
of the people, stories that never get told. On a
second night, John came back again. He was in charge
of the response team that worked a perimeter to make
(06:57):
sure everything was clear. He uh, I gotta tell you
this story. I said, all right, John, what is it?
He says? He said, we were down at the corner
and he says, this car pulls up the parks across
the street we're watching. He said, these these two ladies
got out. It was an old car, looked like it
(07:18):
was held together with duck tape and bob bar. I mean,
it says no car. But they came over to us
and they're carrying these two plastic sacks and they said
to us officers, we understood that the kids need diapers
and milk. He said, you know, we don't have a
whole lot of money. And John says, you tell it
didn't have a whole lot of money, said, we don't
(07:40):
have a whole lot of money. But we got up
early this morning and we've been moying lawns all day long.
And the money we made from mowing lawns, we bought
what we could of diapers and milk. Could you see
that the kids got this. She gave what she had,
and that's why people did. They gave what they had.
(08:02):
The spirit moved our people to do great things. So
we call that the Oklahoma standard now, and we use
that quite a bit when we're talking about responded like
we responded to New York. We talked about the Oklahoma standard.
But we learned some lessons. The first lesson I learned
was the first knight of the bombing, one of our
(08:25):
lieutenants came to me and he says, chaplain, I have
a verse for Oklahoma CEA And so John, I said, Okay,
what's that verse? He says, it's Psalms thirty four eighteen.
God is near the broken hearted and saves those who
are Christian spirit. John, that's pretty good because hearts are
(08:49):
broken and spirits are crushed. We need that verse. So
we carried that verse.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
And you've been listening to Jack Poe, who was a
chaplain for the Oklahoma City Police Department at the time
of America is still worst domestic terrorism attack of all time.
When we come back more of Jack Poe and his
story the Oklahoma City bombing and after here on our
American stories, and we returned to our American stories and
(09:41):
with Jack Poe's story. Jack served as a chaplain for
the Oklahoma City Police Department in nineteen ninety five when
the Alfred P. Murror Building was destroyed in an act
of domestic terrorism. We now turned to another tragedy thirteen
hundred and twenty four miles away from Oklahoma City and
how Jack lent his services there.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Take it away, Jack. So on nine to eleven, we
finish our Bible study and one of our participants works
for the FBI, and I get a call. She says,
it's your TV on in the office. We have a TV.
He wasn't on. She said, no, go turn it on.
(10:25):
I said, go turn it on. Said the plane has
flown into the World Trade Center. So I immediately go
turn on the TV. I see the first plane. They're
showing it again coming in to one of the buildings.
I'm thinking, okay, this clear sky, there's no you know,
(10:48):
somebody get like, what you know, I'm thinking the small plane.
I'm not thinking of a large plane field with a
full tank of gas. But you should have when you
look at it and we see the other plane come in,
and I can tell you at that time my heart,
(11:08):
my heart broke anyway when we saw the first plane
go in. But when the second plane went in, we
knew what one bomb did to us, what two buildings
being hit would do. There's gonna be a lot of casualties,
number one, innocent people who went to work today like
we did April the nineteenth, and had no idea what
(11:29):
was going to happen at nine o two. And I
knew we're probably going to lose some first responders. I knew.
So New York called and asked for the chaplains that
worked the World Building to come to New York Town.
They wanted some experience from us on how you'd handle it.
What did we discover that worked and didn't work. We
(11:53):
packed and we were getting ready to go, and of
course we'd already found out that there's no planes. But
there was a gentleman in Enid, Oklahoma, who had a
subsidiary of their company in New Jersey. I don't know
for sure what they did. I think chemical. Anyway, there's
four brothers that operated now, so one of the brothers
(12:15):
came to ENID every week they switched off. Well, of
course he gets a call from his wife. It says,
you need to come home. So he calls his pilot,
get the jet and come get him. Need to come home, Sir,
I can't. I can't do it. Why can't you do it? Well,
plans are grounded, nobody's doing anything, and he's thinking to himself.
(12:38):
My wife says come home. So he got ahold of
FAA and said, I need to get home. We understand
there's some people that they're asking to come to New
York from Oklahoma City. Can we make this a angel
flight and get them to New York? And Federal Aviation says,
we'll do that. So he paid for the plane, He
(13:02):
paid for the other pilot, He bought all the gas.
He came to Oklahoma City, picked us up, and we
flew to New York. When we landed and got on
the ground, they fueled our played. People asked you what
you do in flying? I was supposed to be up there.
I can imagine we had a lot of a lot
of planes watching us. But anyway, that's how we got
(13:25):
to New York on the flight, and so that started
our first about eighteen days. At ground zero. You see television,
but when you get on site, it's not the same thing.
And I remember I went around there for the first
time and it was dark. All the lights are shining
(13:46):
on it, and you see all the debris that's there,
and I thought to myself, then this looks like I've
seen out of Hollywood. And one of the guys says,
it's real. This is not Hollywood. When we got down
(14:09):
there and they got we got with Leo Flanagan. He
said you all chaplains. We said, yes, what can we
help you with? He says, we need some chaplains over
here to temporary more. I will tell you this, and
that really surprised me. When they brought in bucket of
bones to the medical examiner who was there, he did
(14:30):
not touch that until we prayed over him. He'd say,
all right, chaplains, let's pray. So we prayed over every
one of those buckets of whatever was brought in. I
think that was probably one of the toughest parts, was
to work at more and to see people coming by
wondering if could have identified any of their loved ones
(14:53):
that they knew were probably dead, or did we find
a gun or a badge or something to identify that
this might have been one of our loved ones. You
ask for God's help. We knew it was worse than
Oklahoma City, but I think our mind as chaplains was
(15:17):
what are we Therefore we're not out there to do
rescue work? Why have we showed up that kind of
grabs that your gut. You don't know, but I can't
tell you how many times officers have says to me,
it's gonna be okay because the chaplains here, we bring
to that situation, to that table something that nobody else
(15:38):
can bring. Hope, it's gonna be okay. The Chaplain's here,
which means God's here. You know what we say to people,
There's two rules in life. Number one is, bad things happen.
Bad things happen to good people, and bad things happen
to bad people. And God is not a respect to
a person's The rainfalls on the justice the unjust. And
(16:02):
rule number two is you can't change real number one.
That's life. But we can make a choice on how
we're going to deal with it. That's the key. People
have a choice to make. They can be a victim
or they can be a survivor. Victims focus on what
they can't change. Survivors focus on what they can now.
(16:23):
There's some people like to be victims, but victims get
you nowhere after a while. But when we get there,
we just want to meet people where they are, not
where they hope they are, but where they are, and
just to be a presence. It's a ministry of prisons,
(16:45):
and so I think that helped us was to know
that if we could meet with those people, shared some
things that we have gone through in Oklahoma City, to
tell the stories of survivors, maybe they would gain home.
And some of them did. One of the gentlemen I
(17:06):
met at kay I said, we had this group that
came up on our anniversary, and we sent a group
on their anniversary, and we were having dinner one evening
and they were telling their stories to us, and so
one of the gentlemen said, I lost my son. Said
he called me on the phone and he says, Dad,
(17:29):
soulful heart in here said. We talked for a while,
and he says, people are jumping out of the window.
Talked a little bit more, and he says, Dad, the
phone smelting. That was it. He said, you know I'd
lost my son. There's no doubt I'd lost my son.
(17:54):
Said two choices to make, he said. I went into
my study and I got my Bible. He said, I
could tear it up and throw it in the trash.
Or I could open it up and understand that God
is nearly broken hearted and save those who are Christian spirit,
(18:16):
and I can let his words speak to me, he
says in journeys. It's tough, but I have to make
that choice. I can open it up, let the Spirit
speak to me, Let the spirit guide me to know
that life's going on. My son. Wos want life to
(18:37):
go on. We're going to grievous loss, there's no doubt
about that, but it's not going to parison our future,
cause we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
Paul said, I could do all things through Christ, who
gives me strength. That's where my strength and hope is
(18:58):
not in the event it took place, not the fact
that I've lost a son. My hope is as God
promises that he walk with us to the very end.
So we make that choice, you know, And I can't
make it for other people. They have to make it
(19:18):
for themselves. But I can say to them those that
have chosen to be a survivor rather than the victim,
though the road has been hard, away ahead of the
people that want to be a victim. So I think,
as chaplains, we have that opportunity to bring hope to
a hopeless world, to say life isn't fair, never has
(19:43):
been fair, but God has promised to be our journey mate.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And a terrific job and the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery and Katrina Heine, a contributor
to Our American Stories, the story of Jack po doriv
a chaplain's response to tragedy in his community, and others
here on Our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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