WOW! Twenty-five years.

That hardly seems possible.

September 11, 2001, has joined that small collection of dates where people of a certain age don’t need a history book to tell them what happened.

We remember precisely where we were and what we were doing.

For earlier generations, it was Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination. For mine, the moon landing, the Challenger explosion…and then 9/11.

I was treating patients on that gorgeous Tuesday morning. Then, shortly after 9 a.m., the world changed. Straightening teeth didn’t seem particularly important anymore.

The clinic stopped. Patients stopped. Staff stopped. We gathered around a television and watched something none of us could quite comprehend.

A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then another one did. And suddenly we understood.

My daughter was in fifth grade. She came home and said something that struck me as surprisingly perceptive for a child.

“This is a day that will always be remembered.”

Katie was right. Twenty-five years later, we still say the same two words.

Never forget.

We haven’t forgotten, but what exactly is it that we are supposed to remember?

The nearly 3,000 people who went to work, boarded airplanes, reported for duty, or simply showed up for another ordinary Tuesday and never came home?

Of course.

The firefighters and police officers running toward buildings while everyone else was running away?

Absolutely. Our hearts break every time we hear the stories. But there’s something else about 9/11 that still bothers me in a way few other tragedies do. We see ourselves as part of the story.

Most of us know what it feels like to fly.

We’ve buckled that seat belt. We’ve heard the flight attendant’s safety demonstration. We’ve looked out that little window as the ground disappeared beneath us.

That’s what makes imagining those final moments so gut-wrenching. What would I have done? What would you have done? What goes through a person’s mind when the unthinkable realization arrives that these may be the final minutes of your life?

Who do you call? What do you say? Do you cry? Pray? Fight? Tell somebody you love them?

Pearl Harbor had to be horrifying. The Challenger was horrifying. History is filled with horrors beyond anything most of us can imagine. But 9/11 invaded something painfully familiar to most of us—an office, an airplane, a normal morning.

That’s part of what terrorism tries to destroy. Not simply buildings or lives, but our assumption that ordinary life is safe enough to live without constantly thinking about dying.

For a while, it worked. Evil celebrated an apparent victory.

Then something remarkable happened. We adapted, rebuilt, flew again, and went back to work. We had children, watched ballgames, celebrated birthdays, complained about traffic, argued about politics, stood in ridiculously long airport security lines, and grumbled while taking off our belts and shoes.

The TSA line was certainly annoying, but it also served as a monument of sorts to human adaptation. Something terrible happened. We changed the rules. Then we incorporated those rules into everyday life and kept going.

As human beings, that’s what we do. Which raises a much harder question 25 years later.

Are we better because of 9/11?

I’m not sure. We’re certainly different. We became more vigilant. Maybe more suspicious. In some ways more united, at least briefly. In other ways, perhaps more divided. Twenty-five years of history won’t fit neatly into some inspirational conclusion about how tragedy made all of us better people. It didn’t, and that’s discouraging. But it did remind us of something we spend most of our lives trying not to think about.

There is another 9/11 coming.

I don’t necessarily mean another terrorist attack. I pray there never is one. I mean another day when the world changes without asking our permission. Another war. Another pandemic. Another disaster. Another diagnosis. Another telephone call in the middle of the night. Another moment when somebody somewhere looks at the life they knew yesterday and realizes it isn’t coming back.

That’s the uncomfortable bargain of being alive. There’s no crystal ball. We don’t get to know what’s coming.

And maybe that’s where faith enters the story.

I’ve sometimes treated faith as if it were a guarantee that everything will turn out all right. If you believe enough, pray enough, and drop an occasional twenty in the Salvation Army kettle, surely God will keep the truly terrible things away.

But that’s not what faith is. God never promised us a worry-free life. He never promised that airplanes wouldn’t crash, buildings wouldn’t fall, people we love wouldn’t get sick, or that ordinary Tuesday mornings couldn’t suddenly become something else.

If anything, faith asks us to live without those guarantees.

That’s especially hard for someone like me. I want certainty in my life. I suspect most of us do. We all want to know that our children will be safe, assurance that tomorrow will arrive as scheduled, and that the people we love will still be sitting beside us when it does.

September 11 shattered that illusion on a national scale.

But remember this—uncertainty was there on September 10, too.

We just couldn’t see it.

And if you’re struggling today—with fear, uncertainty, grief, loneliness, or simply something in your life that isn’t turning out the way you hoped—I understand more than you might think. I struggle, too.

I wish I could tell you that everything will be OK. I can’t. That’s a promise none of us gets to make. But 25 years after watching those towers fall, I can tell you this: human beings have an extraordinary capacity to endure things they once thought they couldn’t. Sometimes faith isn’t feeling fearless. Sometimes it’s simply getting up tomorrow morning and trying again.

Maybe faith isn’t believing that God will prevent the next terrible thing. Maybe it’s trusting that whatever comes, fear doesn’t get to decide how we live today.

On September 12, 2001, Americans woke up in a world that looked very different from the one they had awakened to 24 hours earlier. And somehow, they began again. The horror hadn’t disappeared. The grief hadn’t ended. God hadn’t suddenly promised that nothing terrible would ever happen again. They simply got up and kept going.

That’s resilience. And perhaps that’s faith, too.

Twenty-five years later, we still don’t know what tomorrow holds. We never did.

All we can do is live today.

Never forget.

But never stop living, either.

Dr. John Huang is a retired orthodontist, military veteran, and award-winning author. He currently serves as a columnist for Nolan Group Media and invites readers to follow him on social media @KYHuangs. His latest book is Whining for Posterity, available on Amazon.