Courage in Crisis: Michael Hingson & Eve Selis Lean on Faith To Survive
*This episode contains content that may be triggering for some listeners.*
Michael Hingson: The plane hit the tower and then the fuel in the aircraft exploded. And we all agreed we must have been hit by an airplane, but no one knew what was going on because nobody could see what had happened. I immediately heard in my mind a voice that said—as clearly as you’re hearing me now—“Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself.”
Courage in Crisis: Michael Hingson & Eve Selis Lean on Faith To Survive – Episode #424
Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. Our guests this week went through circumstances that could potentially cause someone to want to give up. But instead of descending into panic, or utter hopelessness, they re-centered their focus on their faith, and trusted God that He would provide a way forward.
Blind speaker Michael Hingson faced the unimaginable as a survivor of 9/11, escaping from tower one with the help of his guide dog, Roselle, and the spirit of calm he inhabited became a beacon for others in the middle of the panic and chaos. Singer Eve Selis openly shares about the tragic and devastating loss of her brother Pete, and what her journey of healing looked like. By journaling and praying her way through the darkness, Eve became her most vulnerable self, which resonated with others and helped her find a renewed sense of hope when she’d been hopeless for so long.
Let’s begin with Michael’s story.
Michael Hingson: My name is Michael Hingson. I am in California. I have been blind my entire life. I was not born blind, but I was born two months premature and put in an incubator with a pure oxygen environment. The retina just didn’t develop properly.
So what is it like being a blind man? It is no different than being a sighted man. I went through regular public school, I went to college, I have a master’s degree in physics. I’ve been in the sales world for a well, most of my adult life. That changed after September 11th.
One Survivor’s Story of September 11th
On September 11th, I worked in the World Trade Center as the mid-atlantic region sales manager for a computer company on the seventy-eighth floor of tower one. We had engineers, we had field support people, and I was hired to open and run that office.
I was in my office. The only other person from Quantum who was there was a gentleman named David Frank who was from our corporate office. He was there to help with some seminars that we were going to be conducting that day. I was there to run the seminar, run the PowerPoint projector, show the slides, talk about all the technical aspects, and would be the technical contact for our reseller partners who were coming in that day for the seminar.
The plane hit the building. We heard a muffled thud. At the time it happened, we were on average eighteen floors below where the plane hit, and on the other side of the building.
The plane hit the tower and then the fuel in the aircraft exploded. But it also pushed the building. And tall buildings like that are actually big springs, they’re made to flex in windstorms. The building was pushed and we felt the building move, and then it came back to a vertical position. While it was tipping, I went to my office door and stood in the doorway.
When it did get back to its normal, vertical position, I went back into the office and I met Roselle, my guide dog, coming out from under my desk. Roselle was a yellow lab. I took her leash. I told her to heel, which meant to come around on my left side and sit, which she did. And about that time, the building dropped straight down about six feet, because the expansion joints in the spring, if you will, went back to their normal configuration.
As soon as that happened, my colleague who was in my office with me, David Frank, started yelling, “Oh my God, Mike, there’s fire and smoke and millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside the window. We’re on fire.” And I could hear things kind of brushing by our window.
Sometimes We Have to Believe in What We Can’t See
I said to David, “Stop. Slow down.” “No, we’ve got to get out of here right now,” David said. “Slow down.” “No, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t stay here. The building’s on fire.” And then finally, David, as I put it, used the big card, the big line: “You don’t understand. You can’t see it.” The problem with that was it wasn’t what I wasn’t seeing, it was what David wasn’t seeing.
I had sitting next to me a dog wagging her tail, yawning, going, “Who woke me up anyway?” And not giving any indication of fear. She wasn’t afraid at all, and I knew that if Roselle wasn’t feeling fear, whatever was going on wasn’t such an imminent threat to us that we couldn’t try to evacuate in an orderly way, because dogs have a very greatly heightened sense of those kinds of things.
“I knew that if Roselle wasn’t feeling fear, whatever was going on wasn’t such an imminent threat to us that we couldn’t try to evacuate in an orderly way, because dogs have a very greatly heightened sense of those kinds of things.” – Michael Hingson
We swept the office one last time, and then we got to the stairs and we started down.
Immediately I began smelling an odor, and I was trying to figure out what it was. And it took about four floors to finally realize I’m smelling the fumes from burning jet fuel. And we all agreed we must have been hit by an airplane. But no one knew what was going on because nobody could see what had happened.
So we went down. I kept encouraging Roselle, telling her, “Good girl.” David went down a floor and by the time I got to the forty-ninth floor, David said, “I’m on the forty-eighth floor, Mike. Everything is good here.” Then I went down to forty-eight and he said, “Forty-seventh floor. All is good.” I think that effort on David’s part was one of the most incredible things that I experienced that day. Why? David became a focal point for anyone who could hear him. Anyone in the stairwell that could hear David’s voice, heard somebody saying, “Forty-third floor. Everything is good here, Mike. Going on down the stairs.” Everyone above him or below him listened to him and it gave them something to focus on, something that helped assure them and help to keep panic out of everybody’s minds as much as they could. So David doing that, I think, helped thousands of people. People followed us because as they told me later, “You certainly sounded calm and you were giving Roselle all this assuredness. And so we just followed you.”
Escape From Tower One: Watching the Full Tragedy Unfold
We eventually got to the bottom and we got out and walked over to Broadway in New York and then walked up Broadway. We walked a few blocks and then suddenly we were very close to tower two. And David suddenly stopped and he said, “I can see the smoke and fire in tower two.” We had no clue. We were standing there and David took pictures. I tried to call my wife, Karen. I couldn’t get through to her. I had just put my phone away and David was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled, “Get out of here! It’s coming down now!”
And suddenly we heard this rumble that became this deafening roar. I describe it as kind of a combination of a freight train and a waterfall. You could hear glass breaking and tinkling. You could hear metal falling, and then this white noise of the building tower two just pancaked straight down, maybe one hundred yards away from us.
Everyone turned and ran off in different directions. David turned and ran. I turned Roselle around and we started running back the way we came. And when we started to run, I remember the first thought I had was, God, I can’t believe you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And when I thought that, I immediately heard in my mind a voice that said—as clearly as you’re hearing me now—“Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself.” I felt this absolute calm and certainty that if we worked together, Roselle and I would be fine.
“When we started to run, I remember the first thought I had was, God, I can’t believe you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And when I thought that, I immediately heard in my mind a voice that said—as clearly as you’re hearing me now—‘Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself.’ I felt this absolute calm and certainty that if we worked together, Roselle and I would be fine.” – Michael Hingson
We ran to the next street, going south on Broadway, and we got to the next street, which was Fulton Street, turned right, went about twenty-five yards, and suddenly caught up to David. We got caught in all the dust and debris of tower two’s collapse. We knew we had to get out of that. So we kept running and looking for an entrance to the building that was now on my right hand side. And I kept telling Roselle, “Right, right,” and giving her hand signals. I don’t know whether she could hear me or whether she could see me over all the noise and the dust cloud, but apparently she could. Suddenly I heard an opening on my right. And Roselle must have known what I wanted because she immediately turned right. She took one step and she stopped, and she wouldn’t move.
And so I realized she stopped for a reason and I did a little investigating. Ran my hand along the wall and also stuck a foot out and discovered we were at the top of a flight of stairs. She had done exactly what she was supposed to do, and wasn’t going to move until I gave her the appropriate command. I said, “Forward,” and we went down the stairs and we went into what turned out to be a small arcade entrance to the Fulton Street subway station. There were several people there, and then a gentleman came up from further down in the subway system and took us all down to an employee locker room, where we sat for a while. And then we were there when a police officer came and said, “The air is clear up above.”
We all followed him up the stairs through the arcade, but David looked around and he said, “Oh my God, Mike, there’s no tower two anymore.” And I said, “What do you see?” And he said, “All I see are pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall.” So we stood there for a moment, and then we continued to walk west on Fulton Street, moving away from the area. We got to this little plaza area after walking maybe a quarter of a mile or a half mile.
Suddenly, we heard that freight train/waterfall sound again, and we knew that it must be our tower, tower one, collapsing. There was a little retaining wall, we got behind it and ducked down. And after everything passed by, the wind died down, the noise stopped. We stood up and David looked around and he said, “Oh my God, Mike, there’s no World Trade Center anymore.” I said, “What do you mean?” “It’s all gone.” “What do you see, David?” “I see fingers of fire and flame, hundreds of feet tall, pillars of smoke. It’s just gone.”
We stood there not able, I think, to really process it. And then I tried to call my wife Karen again. She was at home. This time I was able to get through to her. And she’s the first one to tell us how two aircraft had crashed into the towers, one to the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania.
The rest of the day, we spent mostly working our way up toward Midtown Manhattan. We went up to Penn Station where I could catch a train, and then he went on up to where his sister was staying.
And soon as we got home, I took off Roselle’s harness. I was going to take her outside and she would have none of it. She went off, she ran like a shot, grabbed her favorite tug toy, and started playing tug of war with my retired guide dog, Lennie. It was over for her.
Surviving 9/11: The Aftermath
There are a lot of things that happen to us that we don’t necessarily have any control over. But what we absolutely and totally have control over is how we deal with it and how we react to it.
“There are a lot of things that happen to us that we don’t necessarily have any control over. But what we absolutely and totally have control over is how we deal with it and how we react to it.” – Michael Hingson
The reality is, if I can help people learn to deal with fear, if I can help people learn to move on from things that happen in their lives that they didn’t expect… fear is not something that you need to allow to blind you, or paralyze you, or overwhelm you. You can learn to control fear. You can learn to use it as a very powerful tool. It’s in developing that mental muscle to be observant, to learn what goes on around you, to learn how to control what you experience and what you see, and learning that you can choose how you react to things.
Dogs love unconditionally, but they don’t trust unconditionally, and they want to earn our trust just as we need to earn their trust if we’re going to have a positive relationship with them. And so it’s really important to recognize that trust and faith are significant parts of what we all need to do in our lives.
We need to learn how to listen to God, and we need to recognize that all the answers that we need are always available to us if we only really look for them.
“We need to learn how to listen to God, and we need to recognize that all the answers that we need are always available to us if we only really look for them.” – Michael Hingson
Narrator: To learn more about Michael and his story, please visit www.michaelhingson.com. And be sure to check out his new book, Live Like A Guide Dog, at your favorite retailer.
Stay tuned to Eve Selis’ story after a brief message.
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Our next guest is singer and songwriter Eve Selis, who opens up for the first time about the tragedy that struck her family—the loss of her brother Pete after an act of violence. She shares about her journey of healing, how faith became a lifeline when there was nothing else.
Eve Selis: My name is Eve Selis and I am a singer/songwriter. I’ve been touring and singing songs all over the world for decades, and it’s still such a blessing to realize I’m a working musician, especially these days.
So I grew up in San Diego, California, and I am one of eight kids, so a very large family. We had a pretty idyllic life. But it wasn’t until my parents bought me my first record—which was Jesus Christ Superstar—I’m like, That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to sing like that.
And, well, what I know now that I didn’t know then is that you learn how to find your own voice by copying other people. Back in the eighties, I had a cover band called Notice to Appear. And we used to play at the PB cafe and Jose Murphy’s in Pacific Beach. We played the Del Mar cafe. We would do four hour gigs five nights a week. It was insane. Then I joined a band called The Heroes, which was kind of more of a corporate cover band. Actually, in that band we signed the band up for a Department of Defense tour. And it was an incredible experience playing for the troops.
Tragedy Strikes Eve’s Family
I had a brother named Pete, and he was so sweet, kind, and hilarious. He was so funny. My brother was such a good guy. He was always there for our family. He was always the first call for moves. He was a mechanic, so he fixed our cars. When our mom got ill, he was there for her, helping to take care of her. He went on a trip with her to Medjugorje, and they went to Israel and did the whole Christian walk.
But, I guess, like many of us, he had hard times in his life. He had addiction issues. And in his darkest moment, my brother took a gun down to the pool where he lived, and he hurt six people and ended the life of another. And that action ultimately ended his own life.
It was international news within hours, and I fell into the darkest place I’ve ever been. I felt like I was in the darkness that my brother must have been in in order for something like that to happen. None of us could believe it. The man that did that was not the man I knew for forty-nine years, the man I grew up with, the man I love and still love to this day.
There’s just so many unanswered questions when something tragic happens, you are in shock. And your trauma… you can’t breathe. You go into hiding. There’s so much shame involved. And there’s literally nobody to talk to.
“When something tragic happens, you are in shock. And your trauma… you can’t breathe. You go into hiding. There’s so much shame involved. And there’s literally nobody to talk to.” – Eve Selis
Turning to Faith to Get Out of the Darkness
I was in such a dark place for so long, I think it takes at least three months before you can even breathe again. Every time you take a breath, your chest hurts.
After it all happened, I didn’t think I’d ever sing again. I didn’t think I’d ever perform again. I started thinking, Well, I’ll always be that girl whose brother did that thing. And the truth is, I will be. There’s nothing I can do to go back and change what happened. I would do anything to do that.
If I did not believe in God and have my faith, I would not be here right now. It was the only thing that got me through. This is the first time I’ve really shared that story in that detail.
“If I did not believe in God and have my faith, I would not be here right now. It was the only thing that got me through.” – Eve Selis
The Power of Music to Heal
After about a year, I’m in counseling, I’m journaling, I’m trying to get all these emotions out, and I just felt like I must write about this. It was necessary, because I didn’t have people to talk to about this. Music is so healing. I thought, Oh my goodness, I’m going to start writing songs that help me get through this grief.
It’s a spiritual job to be a musician, and music connects us to something bigger than us, and I believe that it’s the closest thing to the divine that we have. God is just pouring His [love] like, “Hey, write a song about this.” And in that year, when I started writing these songs, I realized I wasn’t alone.
“It’s a spiritual job to be a musician, and music connects us to something bigger than us, and I believe that it’s the closest thing to the divine that we have.” – Eve Selis
People would come up to me who knew me and knew what happened, and you can always tell when someone’s going to come to comfort you, right, to give you a hug. And I thought, Oh, that’s so sweet, they’re coming to comfort me. But what happened was they were actually coming for me to comfort them, because what happened to me and my family opened the door for them to share their tragedy. Their brother did this, their dad committed suicide, their mom overdosed, whatever it was, because nobody wants to talk about this stuff. So we all keep it inside. And it was at that point that I realized that I had to do this. I had to start writing.
I wanted this to start in the darkness and then slowly start going back towards the light, which was why I called the record Dark Sky Blue. And the last song on the record is called, “Somebody’s Brother.” And it was the song that scared me the most. I knew I had to write the song, but I was terrified to write the song because I wanted to show the other side of this tragedy, and that is all the families, all the people of somebody who did what my brother did.
And that they had a life. They were a good person, when society says they’re evil and they’re bad. I’ll tell you something, it feels a lot different when that’s your brother.
Until we have compassion for each other and we can see each other as one—that any one of us is capable of darkness under the right circumstances, and making an emotional, horrible mistake, and doing something that they can never change, we’re not going to make it in this world, and we’re never going to find the peace that comes from God and how He uses everything for His purpose and changes everything for good.
You have to surrender. And I will tell you this, the words, “Let go and let God,” were just words to me. And I believed them, but they were just words until they weren’t, you know? Until I was like, “Okay, God. I cannot carry this by myself.” And of course, God’s been there the whole time, right?
Prayer As Comfort During Dark Days
Prayer has helped comfort and brighten my darkest days more than I’ve ever had. It’s so important, I think, to connect to God on a daily basis. And I think sometimes, for me, it’s minute to minute I connect with Him. I think the most important way that I connect to God in my prayer is through gratitude. And I pray, “Thank you God. Thank you for this day. Thank you for my breath. Thank you for my health.” And I thank Him for how He has evolved me from the darkest days of my life.
I can tell you that there is nothing more powerful that you can do for somebody who is hurting than to pray for them or send them a positive thought or text them, “I love you.” That’s a prayer.
“I can tell you that there is nothing more powerful that you can do for somebody who is hurting than to pray for them or send them a positive thought or text them, ‘I love you.’ That’s a prayer.” – Eve Selis
I believe God when He says, “I use all things for a higher purpose and for good,” and that God sees all. He knows all.
A friend of mine gave me Jesus Calling for my birthday, and I started just reading it and loved it, and just found out all about the story and about Sarah Young. I love that Sarah Young is the Beatles of devotional books. Everybody passed on Sarah Young, and she’s like, “No, I’m gonna put it out. I believe in this. This needs to happen.”
I get to read from the book Jesus Listens by Sarah Young, and I’m going to read December 22nd:
Compassionate Jesus,
You came into the world as a Light so that no one who believes in You would stay in darkness. You didn’t just bring Light into the world; You are the Light that shines on in the darkness, for the darkness has never overpowered it. Nothing can extinguish this illumination because You are infinite and all-powerful!
When I believed in You, I became a child of Light. Your brightness entered into my inner being, enabling me to see from Your perspective—things in the world and things in my heart. When Your Spirit illuminates the contents of my heart and shows me things that are displeasing to You, help me to repent and walk in Your ways. This is the road to freedom.
Lord, I rejoice in my brightened perspective. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the Light of the gospel of Your Glory. But because I belong to You, I have the Light of the knowledge of Your Glory shining in my heart! Thank You, Jesus!
In Your bright, illuminating Name,
Amen
Narrator: To learn more about Eve, please visit www.eveselis.com, and be sure to check out her album, Dark Sky Blue, wherever you get your music. If you or somebody you know needs help, Call 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.
If you’d like to hear more stories about turning to God for guidance, check out our interview with Luke Pell.
Next week: Matt Forté
Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from former Chicago Bears player Matt Forté, who shares how his experiences in college football and living in Chicago inspired him to create a foundation that invests in youths and families.
Matt Forté: I just knew I had a calling on my life to be an athlete. But later on, I realized that the calling was not just to use the talent that the Lord has given me, but it was about using the platform that the NFL provides to be able to speak into other people’s lives, and most of all, to be able to glorify God in what I did and what I continue to do.
