Sujo John says surviving the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks became more than a story to tell — it became a call to make the Gospel visible through service.
“What really matters is can you make the gospel seen?” he said in a Sept. 7 interview on the “Bryce Crawford Podcast.”
John, a 9/11 survivor and founder of YouCanFreeUs, joined host Bryce Crawford as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches. The conversation moved from the morning John escaped the World Trade Center to the faith, family, first responders and anti-trafficking work that shaped his life afterward.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum says 2,977 people were killed in the attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. John’s account is personal, but his central question reaches beyond one survivor: What do people do with the life they have been given?
Before the first plane struck, John said he was already wrestling with that question. He had arrived in America from India, taken a marketing job with telecommunications company Network Plus on the 81st floor of the North Tower and emailed a new church acquaintance to ask for prayer because he feared he was chasing money and success instead of God’s purpose.
“The purpose of our everyday living is how can you bring glory and honor to God,” John said, recalling the conviction behind that email in the earlier account of his 9/11 testimony published by CBN. The morning’s ordinary rhythm changed when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower, sending jet fuel, smoke, fire and debris through the building.
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John said he and his colleagues escaped into the stairwell, where thousands of people were making their way down. His wife, Mary, worked in the South Tower, and John said he briefly re-entered the North Tower at the 53rd floor to try to reach her by landline when cell networks failed.
As he continued toward the street, John encountered firefighters and police officers moving upward while civilians fled downward. “The story of 9/11 is truly their story,” he said, remembering the first responders who entered the towers knowing they might not come back; Liberty University previously reported the same emphasis in John’s testimony.
John reached the plaza just before the South Tower collapsed. Buried in ash and debris, he said he and an FBI agent found one another, prayed and crawled toward the flashing light of a crushed ambulance. John said the agent then turned back toward the North Tower to look for more people, a decision that cost him his life.
John did not know whether Mary had survived. After the towers fell, a woman in a New York store helped clear glass from his hair, and his phone finally rang; Mary was alive. John said that reunion helped him understand survival not as a private escape but as a responsibility.
“I feel like God has spared my life to live out the life that I’m living right now,” John said in the interview. His official biography describes the same path from 9/11 survivor to founder of YouCanFreeUs, an organization that says it works to rescue, protect, heal, and empower people trapped in modern slavery.
That work began, John said, after he encountered women and children trapped in India’s sex trade. The story he carries from 9/11 now points him toward people facing another kind of captivity, and toward what he believes is the visible shape of Christian faith: showing up, serving the vulnerable, and refusing to treat another person’s suffering as someone else’s problem.
For John, the anniversary is therefore not only a memorial to what was lost. It is also a reminder that courage can look like a firefighter climbing toward danger, a stranger helping a survivor, a wife answering a ringing phone, or a believer asking how his life can make hope easier to see.
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