November 23. Sujo John. It’s been about two decades since Sujo and his wife Mary left Calcutta and moved to New York City.
In 2008, Sujo started “I Am Second,” a Dallas-based nonprofit experiment. His question was: What would happen if he cast a vision of a life lived for something greater than himself?
To answer that, his group started by telling twenty short-film stories about real people who had adopted a vision of a life lived for “something greater” even though they had gone through life-shattering events. By 2020, Sujo offered more than 130 films—stories told by actors, athletes, musicians, business leaders, addicts, and survivors plus written content and even free access to coaches to help people embrace this mindset. The content has been viewed more than 120 million times by people in more than 230 countries or territories. It helps a lot of people.
When Sujo and Mary first left Calcutta and moved to New York City, both were able to get good jobs. But it was 2001, and their offices were in the World Trade Center. Here’s what happened.
Eternity poses one question with only two answers.
On September 11, 2001, sitting at his desk on the eighty-first floor, Sujo was lost in thought. He was struggling with the reality that as a Christian he wasn’t sharing the gospel with others. He didn’t know what to do. What was God’s purpose in his life?
Those questions would have to wait. He got up and headed to the fax machine—
Then the world around him exploded. And the concussion knocked him down. The air filled with smoke, dust, and office debris. Shattered glass pelted him.
Sujo stood, and the entire building tilted. Through the windows, he could see fireballs shooting out from the floors above him. Fires broke out all around him, and jet fuel from the upper floors seemed to feed the fires.
Sujo picked his way around the jumble of office furniture heaped around him. He had to get to his coworkers and get down to the exit. He had to get out!
The stairwell was already packed with office workers from the floors above the eighty-first floor. It was slow going as the office workers flattened against the wall to make room for first responders heading up to the higher floors. Sujo wondered if those firefighters and medical teams would ever come back down.
It took fifty minutes for Sujo to reach the ground floor, and he rushed to the main entrance. He had to get to the South Tower to find his wife Mary and their unborn child.
But outside the situation was worse. The air—thick with soot and dust—made it hard to see where he was going. Then another explosion rocked the ground.
Right in front of him, the South Tower started to collapse. Turning back, Sujo joined a group of fifteen or twenty people. But nobody knew which way to go or what to do.
Standing there, Sujo’s heart was filled with a burning thought; did these people know about Jesus? Anxiety for them—for their eternal wellbeing—overcame him, and he started to yell, “Call upon the name of the Lord, and you will be saved!”
Even though he was hollering in his own voice, Sujo felt the assurance of the Holy Spirit speaking to each person there on the crumbling plaza. The entire group of men and women of many different faiths and perhaps some with no faith at all joined Sujo and cried out to Jesus to save them.
As the South Tower continued to fall, the soot and ash made it almost impossible to see. Falling debris piled all around, and somehow Sujo lost touch with the group. He couldn’t see them. Wasn’t sure of the direction. He was desperately trying to locate them—when the world around him erupted … the North Tower was collapsing.
Climbing over and around the rubble, he finally found them. They were all lying dead in the debris—in the spot where moments before they had called on Jesus to save them.
“Jesus, they just called upon your name. Why didn’t they make it? What had happened to them?”
Sujo stood there all alone, and the thought that he would soon join them overwhelmed him. There seemed to be no way out.
Then he heard that still small voice. “Son, they made their peace with me in their dying moments. They are resting with me in glory.”
Just then, through the dust and smoke, Sujo saw a blinking red light. He crawled over the rubble, and kept his eyes fixed on the red light. When he got to the street, there was nothing but a tangled wreck of vehicles. At the bottom was a crushed ambulance with one blinking red light … shining directly in his face.
“I know that God placed that light there to lead me out of Ground Zero that morning.” His wife Mary was also spared. She had been late and had never made it to her job in the South Tower.
“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26 NIV).
Eternity poses one question with only two answers. What have you chosen?
John, Sujo. Do You Know Where You Are Going—One Man’s Story of September 11 and the Saving Grace of Jesus Christ. Hendon, VA: Lantern Books, 2002.
John, Sujo. “I Am Second.” White Chair Film. YouTube video. Published August 29, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=CryxwzBuldc.
Story read by: Blake Mattocks
Story written by: Thomas Mitchell, http://www.walkwithgod.org/