Soul Food -- Michele Marr

Two weeks ago Sunday, as I flew home from a conference in Pittsburgh,

I read an account in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of a bus crash a few

miles east of Dallas.

The bus, it said, was loaded with 33 teens and two counselors from

Metro Church in Garland, Texas. It was bound for a summer church camp in

Ruston, La. The crash killed the driver of the bus and four youths, ages

12, 13, 14 and 16.

The story made me think of the 4-year-old child I knew, when I was a

child myself, who was run over by the bus that brought her home from

Sunday school. Her family withstood the tragedy well. But for my mother

and others close to the family the incident seemed to accuse God.

Many years later a friend told me a similar, but more personal, story

of her own. When she and her twin sister were teenagers they attended a

church camp one summer. Her sister slipped from a mountain path and fell

to her death there.

Her family, she said, was embittered toward God after that. And it’s a

bitterness that haunts her still. For her, the death of a child at a

church-sponsored event seems full of insinuation.

On the morning after I arrived home from Pittsburgh I found a message

from my friend Lisa waiting for me.

“I just got an e-mail asking for prayers for a bus in Louisiana that

had an accident taking teens to summer camp,” she wrote. She included a

link to an online news story for me to read and signed off, “Drew is in

Crestline this week at summer camp.” I picked up the phone and called

her. I knew that between the first line in her message and the last,

there was a world of gratitude and sorrow.

Drew is Lisa’s teenage son. He was happy and safe at a church camp in

Crestline. His mother thanked God and prayed and mourned for four

families who had lost their young sons and daughters.

“You think that because it’s a church camp that your children are

safe. You think God will protect them. That nothing bad will happen to

them. But it’s not like that is it,” Lisa asked me.

“No,” I said, “it’s not.”

Even if we may sometimes wish it were so, our faith does not promise

to spare us from suffering.

“In the world you will have tribulation,” Jesus said.

A few weeks ago when I read missionary Gracia Burnham describe the

death of her husband Martin while in the hands of their captors as “God’s

good pleasure,” I winced.

All the same, I know this simply means that Burnham lives more

constantly in the knowledge and the will of God than I do. She trusts

without hesitation what Jeremiah wrote from Jerusalem thousands of years

ago.

“I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts

of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

Roger Davis, spokesman for the Student Life Camp in Ruston said of the

bus crash, “The truth is, God was not off his throne when this happened.

So what we do, is we believe in that.”

Burnham, Davis and my friend Lisa too, rest assured in the words of

St. Paul, “All things work together for good to those who love God, to

those who are the called according to his purpose.”

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

michele@soulfoodfiles.com.f7