LadyoftheFoxes ✝️🇺🇲

Loves God, loves games (board/video) loves to read, animals & loves all! The views expressed here are mine alone and do not reflect the views of my employer.

[Farm Girl Carrie™️👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

Such a lovely tribute to our canine
friends who risked their lives and
made many human lives, just a
little bit better on 9-11 and after.
Good bless all of you sweet babies ♥️🐾

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

On September 11, both towers of the World Trade Center came down less than one hundred yards from a 235-year-old church.

Not one of its windows broke.

For the next eight months, it did not close. Not once. Not for a single hour.

St. Paul's Chapel opened in 1766. It is the oldest church building in Manhattan. On April 30, 1789, George Washington walked out of his inauguration as the first President of the United States and came straight here to pray. His pew is still inside.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a hundred and ten stories of steel fell in the churchyard's direction.

A sycamore tree on the corner of the property, about a hundred years old, took the hit. A steel beam that should have gone through the chapel wall went into the tree instead. The sycamore was torn out by its roots.

The chapel behind it stood. Every pane of glass intact. Only the organ was damaged by dust.

Within days, the church made a decision.

Across the street, thousands of firefighters, police, ironworkers, and volunteers were digging through sixteen acres of rubble for the dead. They were working twelve and sixteen hour shifts. They had nowhere to sit. Nowhere to eat. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to be a human being for ten minutes.

So St. Paul's opened its doors. And it left them open, twenty-four hours a day, until May 30, 2002.

Here is what the inside of a church looked like for those eight months.

The choir loft became a dormitory. Cots in rows. Firefighters too exhausted to make it home to Queens or Brooklyn slept there in their turnout gear.

The pews became beds. Men in steel-toed boots lay down on 235-year-old wood and slept for an hour, and got up, and went back to the pile.

Three thousand meals a day. Breakfast, sandwiches, bagels, coffee, and, because New York restaurants were sending whatever they had, Thai food, Italian, Mexican. One volunteer put it simply. If it was Monday, it was meatloaf.

George Washington's pew, the one he knelt in as the first President of this country, became the podiatry station.

Volunteer foot doctors sat there and treated blisters and torn-open feet. The workers were spending sixteen hours a day on twisted steel and broken glass. Their feet were destroyed. A podiatrist would sit them down in Washington's pew, take off their boots, and go to work.

The volunteers said the podiatrists were the most popular people in the building.

Chiropractors worked the aisles. Massage therapists set up tables. Musicians came and played, quietly, so that men who had been pulling bodies out of the ground for twelve hours could sit with their eyes closed and hear something that was not a diesel engine.

More than five thousand volunteers passed through, in twelve-hour shifts, around the clock, for eight months. They came from every state. Most of them had never been to New York. They made beds. They served meals. They washed dishes. They sat with firefighters who did not want to talk and did not want to be alone.

The clergy wore a vestment during services, and workers started pinning their patches to it. FDNY. NYPD. Port Authority. Ironworkers Local 40. Search and rescue teams from Texas and California. By the end it was covered.

Outside, the wrought-iron fence around the churchyard filled up. Flags. Photographs of the missing. Children's drawings. Rosaries. Letters. It stretched the full length of the block. A wall of grief in front of a building that had somehow come through untouched.

A poet who volunteered there said it this way. What happened at Ground Zero was hate. What happened at St. Paul's was the reverse of it.

On May 30, 2002, the recovery operation officially ended. That same day, St. Paul's held a closing service for the workers, and the eight-month ministry ended.

The church cleaned up. They repaired the organ. They refinished the floors.

But there was one thing they decided not to fix.

The pews.

Two hundred and thirty-five years old, and now covered in scratches and gouges. From steel-toed boots. From tool belts. From men who lay down in them, for an hour, in the middle of the worst days of their lives.

The church left every mark.

They are still there.

You can walk in today, sit down where a firefighter slept in October 2001, and run your hand along the wood, and feel where his belt buckle caught.

The roots of the sycamore are cast in bronze in the churchyard now.

The tree died. The church lived. And then it spent eight months keeping other people alive.

Not one window broke.

Not one door closed. 🇺🇸

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.

So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.

They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.

More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.

That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.

The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.

She was the last.

After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.

Nobody.

Day after day.

The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.

A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.

It was breaking them.

An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.

They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.

The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.

Picture that.

A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.

And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.

And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.

They called them mock finds.

They did it for the dogs.

They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.

One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.

But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.

One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.

Corliss asked where his friend was.

The man pointed at the pile.

"He's in there somewhere."

He kept petting the dog.

Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.

On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.

Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.

They draped her in an American flag on the way out.

Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.

They found one.

And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.

That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.

Nobody could save the dead.

So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

[Mike Malagies @MMalagies]

God knows 99% of you will SKIP THIS😱👀

[Mike Malagies @MMalagies]

God will show you this once (then NEVER again!)

[Holy Bible @Holy__Bible1]

👑

[Mike Malagies @MMalagies]

can I pray for your week? (May 4-10)

[Peanut Butter Box is Here @PBBoxIsHere]

If you ever feel like God doesn't hear you, just ask Him.

[✞ Richard ✞ @Richard_gh1]

“Sleep peacefully tonight, for God is greater than anything you will face
tomorrow.”

1 Peter 5:7

[Holy Bible @Holy__Bible1]

Amen

[Mike Malagies @MMalagies]

can I pray for your month of May?

[Holy Bible @Holy__Bible1]

Heavenly Father,
Thank You for Your love and mercy.
When I am weak, be my strength.
When I am worried, be my peace.
When I am lost, be my guide.
Bless my family, my work, and my future.
Help me trust You in every moment.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.

[Talk Church @churchtalkative]

Share this prayer with someone.❤️

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

The Oklahoma Principal, Kirk Moore, that risked his life and took down an armed shooter at his school was crowned “Prom King”.

Love to see it.

Hero 👑

[𝕐o̴g̴ @Yoda4ever]

Inside the boat, the Golden retriever found something more interesting than the sea itself...🐕⛴️ 😂

[Talk Church @churchtalkative]

4 things you must quit to grow closer to God | The Reusch Family

[Talk Church @churchtalkative]

KEEP RUNNING BACK TO JESUS👏

[Talk Church @churchtalkative]

Always pray, Never give up!

[Holy Bible @Holy__Bible1]

Psalm 18:1