Have you ever heard someone say, “Oh, that was 30 years ago,” and instantly thought of the 1970s?

The truth is, 30 years ago was 1996. My little brother was two years old, just a little boy getting into anything he could reach.

Somehow, that does not feel like 30 years ago.

I think back to our time in school and how history always seemed so far removed from where we were. We sat at our desks learning about the Revolutionary War, pioneer days, presidents, wars, and events that belonged to another time. Some parts of history were our favorite things to learn about. Others, well, we were just happy when that chapter was behind us.

It is not really until adulthood that we begin to understand some of what we were learning and just how much history shaped the world we were growing up in.

And then something even stranger happens.

Our memories start becoming our children’s history.

There are now high school students learning about September 11, 2001, who were not alive when it happened. There are children sitting in classrooms learning about that Tuesday morning the same way we once learned about events that seemed so distant from us.

As adults who remember September 11, that can be hard to comprehend.

It is hard to imagine a life before 9/11 because so much changed that day and in the days, months, and years that followed.

As I was planning school this week, I found myself wondering how exactly I wanted to begin sharing the events of September 11 with my daughter.

As you know, we still filter what she sees in the news pretty heavily. She is nine. I want her to understand the world around her, but I also believe there are things children do not need to see before they are ready to process them.

And 9/11 is difficult because I do not just know the history.

I remember it.

In 2001, I was in middle school. I remember goofing off with my friends when suddenly teachers were running down the hallway telling other teachers to turn on their classroom televisions.

We watched.

We watched smoke fill the air. We watched the towers fall. We watched adults around us trying to understand something that we, as children, certainly could not fully comprehend.

At the time, I do not think I understood that I was watching history.

I was simply watching something terrifying happen on a television in my classroom.

Now, all these years later, I am the adult.

I am the mom trying to decide how to explain that day to my own child.

And I find myself wrestling with a question I am sure parents and teachers have wrestled with for generations:

How do you teach children about the evil that exists in a world broken by sin without making them afraid of the world they have to grow up in?

Maybe that is one of the hardest parts of teaching history.

History contains incredible courage, sacrifice, faith, perseverance, and goodness. But it also contains hatred, war, suffering, and evil. We cannot teach one honestly while pretending the other does not exist.

Yet we can be careful with how much we place on young shoulders at one time.

My daughter does not need every image I saw.

She does not need every detail I eventually learned.

But she does need to know.

She needs to know what happened.

She needs to know about the innocent lives that were lost.

She needs to know about the first responders who ran toward danger while others were running away.

She needs to understand why September 11 changed our country and why, nearly 25 years later, we still stop to remember.

And as her mom, I also want her to understand something greater than the darkness we are studying.

Sin is real. Evil is real. There are things in history that are incredibly difficult to understand.

But evil does not get the final word.

As we study the difficult parts of history, I want to teach her to recognize the darkness without becoming consumed by it. I want her to see courage in the middle of fear, helpers in the middle of tragedy, and people willing to sacrifice themselves for someone they had never even met.

Most importantly, I want her to know where our hope ultimately rests.

The same God who was on the throne on September 10, 2001, was still on the throne on September 11.

And He is still on the throne today.

Maybe that is one of the gifts we have when our memories become history.

We do not simply hand our children a textbook and tell them what happened.

We get to tell them what we remember.

We get to help them understand what changed.

And we get to teach them the lessons we were still too young to understand when we were the children sitting in those classroom seats.