For Such a Moment as This

At 9:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer, a thirty-two-year-old account manager from Cranbury, New Jersey, learned the terrible truth aboard United Flight 93. Through a call with GTE Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson, he and fellow passengers discovered that two planes had already struck the World Trade Center and another had hit the Pentagon. Their hijacked aircraft was a weapon aimed at the nation's capital.

Beamer could have spent his final minutes frozen in terror. Instead, he prayed. Over the phone line, he recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm with Jefferson. Then he and a group of passengers — including Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick — resolved to storm the cockpit, knowing full well what it would cost them.

At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Forty passengers and crew members gave their lives. The United States Capitol still stands.

Mordecai's words to Queen Esther ring across the centuries: "Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?" (Esther 4:14). Esther risked death to save her people. The passengers of Flight 93 were not royalty — they were businessmen, students, grandparents who discovered in one terrible hour that they had been placed on the one flight, at the one moment, when everything depended on their willingness to act.