Twenty-Five Years Later: Where Was God on September 11th?

It truly is up to us to Never Forget the heroes and victims of September 11th, 2001. But the sad reality is that while the attacks happened twenty-five years ago, September 11th is still taking lives. The NYPD lost 23 members that day. In the years since, hundreds more members of the Department have died from 9/11-related illnesses, including my former partner, Lieutenant Paul Murphy, while thousands more continue to battle cancers and other serious conditions.

Across the entire 9/11 community, the toll is even greater. Thousands of responders and survivors have died in the years since, while tens of thousands continue to live with illnesses associated with their exposure.

Even those of us who survived the attack did not simply walk away from it.

September 11, 2001

That Tuesday morning was Primary Election Day in New York City. I was an NYPD sergeant working a day tour, visiting polling locations.

For me, it began as just another workday. That changed quickly.

The first report we heard was that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. My first thought was remarkably mundane: This is going to create absolute havoc with traffic.

As we were pulling up to a polling location, another call came over. A plane had struck the North Tower.

My mind immediately went to a small commuter aircraft or perhaps a sightseeing helicopter. Both were common sights along the Hudson and East Rivers. At that point, the idea that a commercial airliner had deliberately been flown into the World Trade Center was simply beyond comprehension.

Then came the report of the second plane. We knew we were under attack.

My driver took us to the Special Operations Division, where for the first time I was able to see the television coverage. Looking at those images, it became painfully apparent that these were not small aircraft.

I had quit smoking about a week earlier.

I called my wife and told her that I was “quitting quitting.”

I knew a cigarette shop nearby and had my driver stop. I ran inside for a pack and discovered that, of all things, they were out of my brand.

The clerk and I just stared at each other.

I could have bought something else, but for whatever reason, I didn't. I walked back outside almost as if I were trying to process this strange little inconvenience in the middle of everything happening around us.

My driver asked if we were ready to go.

“No,” I told him. “They're out of my brand.”

So we went somewhere else.

I got my cigarettes, and we immediately headed toward Manhattan.

During the drive, I called my wife again and told her where we were going.

She panicked.

“You can't go in,” she told me. “You don't have your vest.”

In one of those strangely funny moments that somehow occur even on the darkest of days, I replied: “They're flying planes into buildings. I don't think my vest is going to help me.”

We had only been married for a couple of years. For her, I think that moment brought a sudden realization of what being married to a police officer could mean.

Because this is what we do.

We run toward the danger, not away from it.

Going In

The drive toward Manhattan was difficult. Cars had been abandoned in the roadway, forcing us to weave around them and drive along the shoulders.

At one point the view ahead opened up and I could see the Twin Towers.

Black smoke billowed from them against an otherwise crystal-clear blue September sky.

When we reached the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, there was a firetruck stopped near the toll plaza. As we were about to pass it, a firefighter jumped out and stopped us.

Before I could really process what was happening, a wall of smoke and debris came pouring out of the tunnel.

Then came civilians.

They were running out, covered from head to toe in gray ash.

For a moment, I thought the tunnel itself had been attacked.

My mind was still focused on one thing: get to the World Trade Center.

I directed my driver toward the Brooklyn Bridge instead.

By the time we got there, we encountered an enormous mass of people trying to get out of Manhattan. It quickly became obvious that we weren't going to drive much farther, so we took the first exit we could.

I remember looking at my driver and saying:

“I have no idea what's going to happen, but it's been an honor working with you.”

I suppose that was the moment when I finally resigned myself to the enormity of what we were heading into, as well as the danger.

We abandoned the car. And then the job changed.

The Never-Ending Wave

Instead of getting to the World Trade Center, we found ourselves helping evacuate civilians.

Much of what followed is a blur.

What I remember most clearly are the people. They just kept coming.

Wave after wave of humanity moved away from Lower Manhattan, looking to police officers, firefighters and anyone else in authority for direction. We treated the injured where we could and kept everyone moving away from the danger.

It seemed endless.

The evacuation of Lower Manhattan that day was extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands fled on foot, while an improvised armada of ferries, tugboats, Coast Guard vessels and private boats carried hundreds of thousands more across the surrounding waterways. Estimates put the number upwards of a million people.

For comparison, the legendary evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II rescued approximately 338,000 Allied troops over nine days.

We did it in nine hours.

Standing there in the middle of it, though, there were no statistics.

There were simply people.

And they didn't seem to end.

Where Was God?

In the years that followed, I was repeatedly asked a question: “Where was God on September 11th?”

As a survivor and as a Christian, I heard it often. Some people asked because they genuinely needed an answer. Others asked out of anger.

Eventually, I realized that I needed an answer of my own.

That search ultimately led me to write my book, Where Was God?

The deeper I went into that question, the more I came to believe something very simple: God was where He always is.

Later that night, when I finally reached Ground Zero, I stood looking at a place I had known intimately. Except now I barely recognized it.

The devastation was almost impossible to comprehend. The pile was indescribable from ground level. Fires burned throughout the debris. Smoke hung everywhere.

Looking at it, I could not understand how anyone could possibly have survived.

And yet, they did.

Approximately 17,000 people were inside the Twin Towers that morning. Nearly 87 percent escaped.

The buildings were only about one-third to one-half occupied when the attacks occurred. Had both towers contained their full populations of roughly 20,000 people each, investigators would later estimate that approximately 14,000 people might have died because there would not have been enough time to evacuate them all.

The towers stood 110 stories high—more than a quarter-mile into the sky.

Yet neither toppled sideways across Lower Manhattan.

One structural engineer would later estimate that had a tower fallen outward into the surrounding city, casualties might have reached 100,000.

None of that diminishes the almost unimaginable loss of 2,977 innocent lives that day, but it reminds us that amid an act designed to produce death on an almost incomprehensible scale, thousands upon thousands lived.

For hours afterward, we desperately hoped survivors would continue to be found beneath the rubble.

One more was.

The Angel in the Rubble

Her name was Genelle Guzman-McMillan.

Genelle was a Port Authority employee working on the 64th floor of the North Tower. She and several coworkers managed to descend more than fifty floors before the building collapsed around them.

She had made it to approximately the 13th floor. Then the world came down.

Genelle survived inside a tiny pocket beneath the mountain of concrete and steel. Badly injured and unable to free herself, she remained trapped for approximately 27 hours and she prayed.

Genelle has recounted that while she lay beneath the rubble, believing she might die there, she asked God to save her and promised that if He gave her another chance at life, she would change the way she lived.

Eventually she heard voices.

She cried out and worked at the debris with the one hand she could move.

Then, according to Genelle, a hand reached through the rubble and took hers.

A man reassured her.

His name, he told her, was Paul.

For Genelle, what happened beneath that rubble became something much more than a rescue. She came to believe that God had answered her prayer.

She ultimately described that experience in her memoir, Angel in the Rubble.

And at approximately midday on September 12th, after some 27 hours buried beneath the ruins of the North Tower, Genelle Guzman-McMillan became the last person pulled alive from the World Trade Center rubble.

And What About Me?

God didn't cause September 11th.

Men did.

But I believe God moved in the lives of those who rescued people that day.

I believe He moved in the lives of firefighters and police officers climbing stairwells while thousands of people were coming down.

I believe He moved through the paramedics, construction workers, ferry captains, tugboat crews and ordinary citizens who saw people in danger and chose to help them.

I believe He was present in the seemingly insignificant delays that caused some people to arrive late for work that morning.

And I believe God saved me with something as insignificant as a pack of cigarettes.

It wasn't until much later that I put the timing together. Had that first store had my brand of cigarettes, I would have been further along on my journey into Manhattan.

Based on our route and timing, I believe I would have been at the South Tower around the time it collapsed.

Of all the things that happened to me that day, that delay is one I have never forgotten.

A cigarette store didn't have my brand that day, but it gave me the next twenty-five years.

Twenty-Five Years Later

September 11th demonstrated the extraordinary things human beings are capable of doing to one another, but it also demonstrated the extraordinary things human beings are capable of doing for one another.

For me, that distinction matters.

The Bible begins with humanity being given a perfect world—and choosing to turn away from God. We have been living with the consequences of human choices ever since.

September 11th, like so many horrific events throughout human history, demonstrated the terrible depths to which mankind can descend when hatred consumes the human heart and faith itself becomes twisted into a justification for evil.

So perhaps, after twenty-five years, the question isn't simply: “Where was God?”

Perhaps the question we should be asking is: “Where are we?”

What have we done with the years we have been given?

What have we done for the people around us?

Have we remembered those who never received another morning after September 11th?

Have we remembered those who survived that day, only to lose their lives years later because of it?

Have we remembered the families who still carry those empty places at their tables?

And have we remembered how, on one of the darkest days in American history, ordinary people did extraordinary things for complete strangers?

Never Forget cannot simply be something we say once a year.

It has to mean something.

If you have never trusted in God, I would encourage you to reach out to Him. On this 25th anniversary, as we remember those we lost and those we continue to lose, I leave you with the words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

May we never forget those who were taken from us.

May we never forget those who ran toward the danger.

May we never forget those who are still suffering.

And may we never forget how precious—and how uncertain—the gift of another day truly is.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

May God bless you, and may God bless all those whose lives were forever changed on September 11th, 2001.

Exposed King Is Now Available for Kindle Pre-Order

I’m excited to announce that Exposed King, the next novel in the James Maguire series, is now available for pre-order on Amazon Kindle.

This story follows NYPD Commissioner James Maguire as New York City begins to unravel. Criminals are turning up dead. Fear is spreading. And somewhere in the chaos, someone is making it clear that the system no longer works the way it’s supposed to.

As pressure mounts, Maguire is forced to confront not just a growing body count, but the uncomfortable reality that justice—when filtered through politics, power, and public anger—rarely remains clean.

Exposed King was written as a crime thriller, but at its core it’s a question:
What happens when trust in the system collapses, and people decide the rules no longer apply?

If you enjoy gritty NYPD procedurals, morally complex characters, and stories that feel uncomfortably close to the real world, this one was written for you.

The Kindle edition is now live for pre-order on Amazon, with release coming soon.

Thank you to everyone who’s followed the James Maguire series so far. I can’t wait to put this one in your hands.

— Andrew G. Nelson

Cover Reveal: EXPOSED KING

Today, I’m excited to officially reveal the cover for Exposed King, the next James Maguire novel.

I didn’t set out to write a book that mirrored the moment we’re living in—but sometimes fiction gets there first. Exposed King explores what happens when justice fractures, trust collapses, and a city is pushed to the edge. Today, I’m revealing the cover.

From the beginning, this story has been about pressure—on a city, on the justice system, and on the people sworn to uphold it. The cover reflects that tension: a city on edge, authority under siege, and a single figure standing at the center of it all.

Exposed King asks a simple but uncomfortable question: What happens when the system stops working—and people decide to take justice into their own hands?

This book was written before many of the events we’re witnessing now, but like the best crime fiction, it explores forces that never really go away: power, anger, corruption, and the consequences of pushing society too far.

The story is coming soon.
And so is the reckoning.

The System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working as Designed

Recent events have once again exposed a dangerous game being played by those in power. A familiar pattern repeats itself: politicians pander to a base they know will not question narratives, will not dig into history, and will not examine the mechanics of government. Emotion is rewarded. Outrage is amplified. Nuance is punished.

And the consequences are never borne by the people making the speeches.

Laws, Blame, and Convenient Amnesia

Here’s an uncomfortable truth that rarely gets said plainly enough: Politicians write the laws. Law enforcement enforces them.

The legislative branch creates policy. The executive branch carries it out. That division is foundational to how our system is supposed to function. But when laws become politically inconvenient—when enforcement generates backlash—the same politicians who authored those laws suddenly develop amnesia.

Instead of revisiting bad policy or owning the consequences of their votes, they deflect. They point to “rogue officers.” They vilify the very people tasked with enforcing statutes that lawmakers themselves passed, funded, and defended.

It’s a neat trick: create the problem, then redirect the anger toward the most visible uniform in the room.

Power Preserved, Lives Spent

At the local level, this dynamic becomes even more dangerous. City councils, mayors, and prosecutors gin up public anger, knowing full well they will never stand between that anger and its consequences. They speak recklessly from behind microphones while officers are sent into the streets to absorb the fallout.

Those officers are not policymakers. They are employees—hired to do a job, bound by oath, procedure, and law. Yet they find themselves caught in the crosshairs: politically expendable, publicly condemned, and personally threatened for doing precisely what they were ordered to do.

Power is preserved. Lives are risked. And the gap between rhetoric and reality grows wider.

Selective Memory and Political Shape-Shifting

What makes this moment especially corrosive is the sheer audacity of the flip-flopping.

We are told today that certain policies are “fascist” or “authoritarian,” despite being openly supported—sometimes enthusiastically—by the very same political figures in previous years. Calls for stricter immigration enforcement once framed as pragmatic governance are now recast as moral atrocities. Policies once defended as necessary are retroactively condemned when they become politically inconvenient.

We are asked to believe two contradictory things at once: that enforcement is tyranny, and that the people who enforced it before were heroes.

This isn’t moral growth. It’s political shape-shifting.

When Law Enforcement Becomes the Enemy

There is a line—an old one, and a dangerous one—that societies cross when law enforcement is successfully reframed as “the enemy of the people.” When that happens, anarchy doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in slowly, justified as righteous anger, tolerated as political expression, excused as necessary pressure.

But here is the part no one in the crowd is meant to think about:

Once protests outlive their usefulness…
Once the anger reaches critical mass…
Once it threatens the same politicians who encouraged it…

The switch flips.

The same law enforcement once vilified becomes indispensable again. The same laws once condemned are suddenly enforced with urgency. And the same people who were cheered on in the streets find themselves facing the full weight of the system they were told no longer applied.

History is very clear on this point.

Why I Wrote Exposed King

These themes sit at the heart of my upcoming novel, Exposed King. What begins as a crime story quickly becomes something more unsettling: a portrait of a city where politics paralyze justice, where leaders hide behind ideology, and where the consequences of that cowardice begin to surface in blood.

The book isn’t an endorsement of chaos or vigilantism. It’s a warning about trajectories—about what happens when leaders stop governing and start posturing, when enforcement becomes a political liability instead of a civic necessity, and when responsibility is endlessly deferred.

Because when the system teaches people that laws are optional, enforcement is immoral, and accountability is selective, it shouldn’t be surprised when someone decides the rules no longer matter.

And by then, it’s already too late.

When Fiction Bleeds Into Reality: A Cautionary Tale

There’s a moment every writer dreads—not writer’s block, not bad reviews—but the quiet realization that the story you’re telling no longer feels speculative.

It feels familiar.

As I prepare to release the latest James Maguire book, Exposed King, I’ve found myself increasingly unsettled by the daily news cycle. Headlines that once would have sounded exaggerated now feel routine. Language that once belonged in dystopian fiction is now spoken casually from podiums, press briefings, and social media feeds.

And that should concern all of us.

Writing a Story I Never Wanted to Be Relevant

Exposed King follows NYPD Police Commissioner James Maguire as he investigates a disturbing pattern: criminals turning up dead, seemingly targeted, seemingly judged, seemingly executed. The city is already fractured—politically, socially, morally—and instead of unifying in the face of fear, its leaders retreat into tribal lines, rhetoric, and blame.

Maguire isn’t just fighting a killer.
He’s fighting paralysis.
He’s fighting politics.
He’s fighting the slow erosion of trust between the public and the system meant to protect them.

I began outlining Exposed King in 2019—long before the social fabric felt this frayed, before institutions were openly questioned at every turn, and before division became a political currency. At the time, much of what I was writing felt speculative, even risky. I remember second-guessing certain plot points, worried that I might be “jumping the shark,” pushing the story too far beyond what readers would find believable. Now, as the book nears release, I find myself unsettled for an entirely different reason: those same elements no longer feel exaggerated. They feel plausible. Worse, they feel familiar—like stories that could comfortably lead the evening news rather than live between the covers of a novel.

That growing sense of recognition is also part of why Exposed King took longer to finish than I ever anticipated. As the world began to resemble the story I was trying to tell, I found myself slowing down—not because I had run out of ideas, but because the line between fiction and reality had blurred. The story demanded more care, more restraint, and a deeper understanding of the consequences it was pointing toward.

Exposed King was intended as a cautionary thriller—a “what if.” What if leaders spent more time posturing than protecting? What if laws were enforced selectively? What if criminals were elevated as symbols while ordinary civilians were reduced to statistics? What if accountability vanished, replaced by ideology?

I never expected to watch those questions unfold in real time.

The Dangerous Game of Anarcho-Tyranny

There’s a concept often discussed in political theory called anarcho-tyranny: the idea that institutions grow increasingly oppressive toward the law-abiding while becoming increasingly permissive toward the lawless.

You see it when:

• Crime rises, but consequences vanish

• Civilians are told to “understand” while victims are told to endure

• Violence is condemned selectively, depending on who commits it

• Entire groups of people are demonized for their beliefs, their votes, or their skin color

When leaders fan these flames—intentionally or not—they gamble with something they cannot control: human breaking points.

History shows us, again and again, that when good people feel abandoned, ignored, or sacrificed for political optics, something snaps. Not in everyone. Not at once. But enough to change the trajectory of a society.

That’s the danger zone.

When the System Loses Moral Authority

One of the central tensions in Exposed King is this:
What happens when the system loses the moral authority to govern?

Not legally.
Morally.

When people no longer believe justice is possible, they don’t stop believing in justice altogether—they start redefining it. And that’s when things turn dark.

This isn’t an endorsement of vigilantism. Quite the opposite. It’s a warning. A society that pushes its citizens into corners—where law feels optional for some and suffocating for others—creates the very monsters it later claims to fear.

And here’s the part that should keep politicians awake at night:

Once violence becomes normalized, once dehumanization becomes routine, once “enemy” replaces “neighbor,” the crosshairs don’t stay fixed on the margins forever.

They move.

A Personal Unease

As a writer, I’m supposed to imagine worst-case scenarios. I’m supposed to explore uncomfortable questions. But I never wanted to feel like I was chronicling the present.

There’s a deep discomfort in watching scenes I labored over—conflict, distrust, political theater—play out not on the page, but in real cities, with real victims, and irreversible consequences.

Stories are meant to provoke thought, not serve as blueprints.

A Caution, Not a Call

Exposed King is not a manifesto. It’s not an argument for one side or another. It’s a warning about trajectories—about what happens when leadership prioritizes ideology over stability, messaging over lives, and division over responsibility.

The path we’re on is a dangerous one.

If leaders continue to sacrifice cohesion for applause, morality for momentum, and people for power, they shouldn’t be shocked when the consequences arrive uninvited.

Because once society decides the rules no longer apply evenly… everyone becomes vulnerable.

Including those who thought they were untouchable.