They Would Not Use the Word
The word for Wednesday, September 9, 2026 is They Would Not Use the Word.
The anchor verses are Luke 8:17 and Hebrews 4:13.
New York City opened a public portal yesterday with an initial release of more than one hundred seventy thousand pages from the aftermath of September 11.
Air quality reports. Contamination records. Internal correspondence. Records from city agencies. The release came through a settlement of two lawsuits brought by 9/11 Health Watch after years of requests for material about health concerns and air quality.
Some of the records show officials discussing hazards and liability while residents and workers were also hearing public assurances that the air around Lower Manhattan was safe.
The release includes extensive asbestos testing. The Mayor said the records show asbestos was found nearly everywhere inspectors tested. Separate Health Department research has found asthma diagnoses in about twenty-five percent of children exposed to World Trade Center dust, compared with sixteen percent in the general population of the same age.
One page is an unsigned cleanup note from May 2002.
It says the word risk would not be used in letters about the cleanup because using it would "defeat the purpose of creating public confidence."
They would not use the word.
That sentence does not tell us everything about motive, and this Word will not make it do that. It does tell us that somebody weighed a public health word against public confidence and chose the confidence.
Then there are the boxes.
Sixty-eight boxes of Department of Environmental Protection records were not located until 2025 despite repeated public records requests. The city had previously said searches had found no responsive records. The boxes were there. What changed was that somebody finally found and opened them.
Luke has a sentence that sounds made for a morning like this.
For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.
But Luke puts that sentence underneath a lamp. JESUS is speaking about light, revelation, and how people hear. HE is not giving New York a timetable. The verse does not promise that every buried document will become public while the people who need it are still alive.
It does refuse the idea that hiddenness is ultimate.
Hebrews goes further in a different direction.
Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.
A record can be hidden from a city resident.
A box can be missed by a records search.
Nothing in creation is hidden from GOD.
That matters because public disclosure can arrive very late. Sometimes the file appears after the person it might have helped is dead. Sometimes the scan is clear after years of being told nothing was there. Sometimes the witness is finally believed after the damage cannot be undone.
GOD did not learn anything yesterday.
HE knew what was in the air over Lower Manhattan in 2001. HE knew what was inside those boxes. HE knew every body that breathed the dust and every decision made in rooms the public could not enter.
And Hebrews cuts both ways.
It comforts the person whose harm went unseen. It also removes hiding places from the person who knew more than they said. The verse ends with accountability. Nothing is merely observed and forgotten before GOD.
Somebody reading this has been telling the truth for years and has not been believed.
About what happened to you. About what somebody did. About pain no scan has explained. About a history that became paperwork in somebody else's file.
Human systems need records. Sometimes they need them for good reasons. Doctors, courts, insurers, and public programs cannot know what GOD knows. Documentation can protect people, establish facts, and keep one person's claim from becoming another person's unquestioned verdict.
So this is not a promise that every memory is exact or every accusation is right.
Hebrews does not turn our certainty into GOD's certainty.
It says GOD sees what is actually there.
That is why the verse can comfort and correct at the same time.
You may still need the test. The affidavit. The record request. The second opinion. The witness who finally says, yes, I saw it too.
But GOD's knowledge of what happened does not begin when the paperwork arrives.
Friday is the twenty-fifth anniversary. The portal does not heal a lung. It does not restore the years between a request and an answer. More records are expected over the next twelve months, and some people who needed them most did not live long enough to read them.
What holds is smaller and harder.
Human archives can be incomplete.
GOD's knowledge is not.
We may need years to uncover what is true.
HE does not.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been telling the same true thing for years and keeps being asked for one more piece of proof.
- 🙏 To the first responder, resident, worker, or child who breathed that air and is still living with what followed.
- 🙏 To the person whose work is to find, preserve, and release records that somebody else may desperately need.
- 🙏 To the one who knows they helped hide, soften, or delay a truth, and who still has time to tell it plainly.
Grace and Peace.