Every year on this date, I would ghostwrite a 9/11 message on behalf of our CEO. His colleagues perished in the twin towers that morning, and it fell to me to put words to that grief for him and for our employees and clients.

For more than a decade, I sat at my desk on the days leading up to September 11, trying to carry another man’s story with dignity, knowing my sentences would land in thousands of inboxes as a reminder that we must never forget.

But today feels different.

Today I write not in someone else’s voice, but in my own.

Because yesterday, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Many of you knew him, admired him, or followed his movement.

Whether you agreed with every word or not, his voice carried weight. And now—like so many on that September morning in 2001—his voice has been silenced in an instant.

The parallel is haunting. Two very different men, two very different moments in history.

But the same sobering truth. Life is a vapor. Death interrupts without warning. One heartbeat, one bullet, one plane, and everything changes.

On 9/11, we learned how fragile our towers were. Yesterday, we were reminded how fragile our bodies are.

Both moments pull back the curtain on how little control we have and how fleeting our days truly are.

As believers, though, we do not grieve as those without hope.

We are pilgrims here—sojourners passing through a world that groans under the weight of sin and violence, headed toward a homeland whose foundations cannot be shaken. The City of God, not built by human hands. The place where tears are wiped away, and death and heartache and suffering is swallowed up in victory.

I think of Psalm 39: “You have made my days a handbreadth, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath.”

That verse is not meant to crush us, but to free us. To remind us that this world was never the destination. Heaven is real. Christ is alive. And the hope of resurrection is not wishful thinking—it is blood-bought certainty.

So today, on this day when I used to write about 9/11 in another man’s voice, I write to you in mine:

Don’t waste your breath. Don’t cling too tightly to what you cannot keep. Don’t anchor your hope in movements, in money, in leaders, in towers. Anchor it in Christ.

Because the only safe ground on a day like today is the same safe ground that will hold on the day you breathe your last: Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, who has gone to prepare a place for us.

We are just pilgrims.

But we are pilgrims headed home.