Strangely Unaware

Monday, March 29, was our final day in Russia. My wife, Sharon, and I had traveled to Russia to visit with our son and daughter-in-law. Reid is a professional volleyball player who plays for the US National Team during the spring and summer, and who plays professionally in the Russian Super League during the fall and winter. We had a great time with them in their Russian hometown of Novosibirsk, Siberia, and spent the final weekend in Moscow seeing the sights in the city center.

This final day was to be quite simple; wake up, eat breakfast, pack, take a taxi to the airport and fly home. But around 8 am, we began to notice the sound of sirens, lots of sirens, more sirens that I had ever heard at one time. The view from our hotel window was somewhat restrictive with tall buildings all around us, so we couldn’t really see what was going on.

We turned on the TV to a BBC station and learned that there had been an explosion in a metro station near the Kremlin. Interesting, our hotel is near the Kremlin. The news anchor identified the location of the blast as the Lubyanka Metro Station. I looked on the map and realized that this station was just a couple of blocks from our hotel.

Now, of course, the sirens made sense. Soon helicopters were flying overhead and there was a general buzz in the streets. It turns out that the helicopters were airlifting the injured for transport to nearby hospitals. About a half-hour later, the BBC reported that there had been a second blast in another nearby metro station. Sharon and I had just been on the metro the day before – twice!

Though it was the middle of the night in the US at the time, I went to the hotel business center to go online and alert folks back home that we were in the middle of what was going on, but that we were safe. I left the hotel to go to a phone shop to add minutes to my cell phone in case we needed to contact people. Oddly, on the side streets, it was business as usual. People were scurrying to work and hundreds were entering and leaving yet another metro station a few blocks from the blast. I wondered if they knew what had happened and took their chances anyway, or if perhaps the news was so fresh that it hadn’t reached them yet.

The hotel desk advised us to leave very early for the airport in the event that getting through the city would be difficult under the circumstances. We boarded the taxi on the side street in front of the hotel where things were relatively quiet and drove the half block to the main artery that rims Red Square and the Kremlin. Traffic was thick, the street was lined with media vans with large satellite dishes on the roofs, and reporters and camera operators were everywhere. Red Square and the Kremlin were barricaded and bus loads of police and military personnel were arriving one after the other.

Fortunately for us, the main road out of the city was clear. The inbound lanes were clogged, but outbound was open and we made it to the airport without delay. All throughout the terminal people were gathered around flat screens keeping up with the latest developments.

We boarded our plane and ten hours later we were at JFK in New York. There were no sirens, no helicopters, no barricades, media vans or busloads of police and military personnel, just a vague, detached awareness that something had happened in Moscow earlier in the day.

In considering these events on this Easter weekend, it occurs to me that many of us are keenly aware of the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension and reign of Jesus Christ, while many more move through life with a vague, detached unawareness of our Lord and the implications for their eternal souls. Here am I, send me.