Once in a while, someone from the UK reads
my blog. I am posting this just in
case. I know enough history to know God
has blessed that island in the past; my prayer is that He will do so again.
Ten years ago
my wife and I were planning on our first visit to London. We were excited. We would be there in late July. It would be the vacation of a lifetime; we
had been to Australia twenty years before but that was work related.
Then, on 7 July
2005, we woke to the news of the bombings.
We never changed our plans to go, though we had to plot another route to
our hotel since our tube station had been temporarily closed.
We arrived in
the UK some two weeks after the bombings.
A bus from Victoria Station took us to our hotel. A kindly old
gentleman asked our destination and he said he would alert us for our
stop. He talked about the city, pointing
one of the bombing sites. He didn’t have
to tell us London was still on high alert.
There seemed to be a police officer on every corner, some armed with
automatic weapons.
Our guide
didn’t tell us where to get off; he got off the bus with us to make sure we
knew the direction to take. Then, he
asked if I read Ruth Rendell. I said I liked Inspector Wexford. He reached into his OxFam bag and gave me a
book. He said, “It was just 75p. I had read it but at that price I couldn’t
pass it up.” I knew immediately that any
city where strangers on the street give you books was my kind of city.
Our hotel, it turns out, was in a
middle-eastern community; Muslims were everywhere. Over the week we stayed in that neighborhood,
they smiled at us, welcomed us into their stores, and accepted our condolences
concerning the bombings. Across the
street from the hotel, at an impromptu memorial for the victims of the Edgware
Road station bombing there were stacks of flowers. I’ll always remember the sign that simply
said, “Muslims didn’t do this.”
Over the next
few days we saw a city recalling its past.
Stores had signs declaring business as usual. Strangers went out of their way to be kind to
Americans trying to figure out the intricacies of the Underground. We were standing outside Buckingham palace
when a news crew approached us to ask if we were afraid. Standing within sight of several members of
the Queen’s Guard, we thought it would have been a little silly to say we were
afraid. Instead, we said we appreciated
the fortitude of the Londoners.
We brought home
many more memories from that trip but I just wanted to share these.
