On July 9, 2001 the other members of my senior class and I left Milo Adventist Academy and traveled about 15 miles into the mountains for a week of wilderness survival training. Senior Survival is a tradition at Adventist high schools dating back many years and designed to impart survival skills to the next generation in the church so that they’ll be ready to flee to the mountains during the “time of trouble” when secular and religious authorities have all united under the Pope and any who refuse to submit will face arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death.

Each day was filled with various classes. We had wild edibles classes, survival techniques, and team building exercises, but each day began with “Spiritual Survival.” We were studying from a book that contained apocalyptic excepts from Ellen G. White’s book, The Great Controversy.

Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, the principal arrived, bringing with him one of our classmates who had just come back from Texas where he had been for a family wedding. We were in the middle of the Spiritual Survival class and the pastor leading it stopped for a break. He spoke with the principal for a few minutes and then we resumed the class. He said:

What if I were to tell you that terrorists have hijacked four airliners. Two that had left airports in New York and were headed to LA (or wherever they were going) were flown into the World Trade Center; two more had taken off from Dulles and headed to LA (or where ever they were going), one of those was flown into the Pentagon, and the other aircraft is likely headed for the Capitol or the White House. What would you think?

We had just been studying about the signs of the end of time and the danger of being deceived by false prophets and other servants of Satan. The responses ranged from “I’d say the end was near” to “I would suspect that it was a trick to deceive us.”

Just six weeks before I had been on a United Airlines flight from Dulles to LAX. I also knew that the planes on those routes can easily hold 250+ people and that the flight I had been on was almost full. I had just been in the Pentagon and the Capitol nine weeks before, and I knew that the World Trade Center had somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 people working in it. I knew it couldn’t be true.

As far as we all knew, it was just a harmless exercise. After about 5 or 10 minutes of discussion, he continued, “It actually happened.” He then told us the details again and let us know that fighters had been scrambled to intercept the fourth plane, that all civil aviation had been grounded, and that our classmate had been on one of the last few planes to land in Medford.

About three-quarters of the class believed him and many of them burst into tears. The rest of us thought it was just a sick ploy to make a cheap point, even though the principal and our classmate corroborated the story. I expected him to say something like, “See, it is easy to be deceived. You need to do a better job of keeping your guard up.” But he didn’t.

Before long the principal finally found a news radio station that we could receive in our remote location and we all sat their and listened to it. I was still skeptical until I heard Senator Gordon Smith talk about it, one classmate held out until the President came on.

Those of us who had held onto some skepticism were angry. More than anything else, we were angry that a pastor had used the biggest tragedy of our lifetimes as a cheep ploy to make a religious point.

We finished out the week, but it was different. We are all a little more serious, more somber, we had lost our innocence. What was the most eerie was that we were on the major flight path between such airports as Seattle and Portland to the north and San Francisco and LA to the south and the skies were quite.

By the time we returned to campus on Friday they had stopped showing the videos of the towers falling. In fact, it was six months before I finally got to see that. It was six months before I got the closure that seeing it brought.

I still harbor some resentment towards that pastor. What he did was simply wrong. Even worse, one of my classmates married him a few years later.