What do you do with your feelings, with the mix of terror and grief that comes with dozens of sudden deaths in a natural disaster?
The floods just south and west of us this weekend? I can’t even figure it out practically, much less philosophically: how do we fully or even partially make peace with this very real part of human existence, with natural disasters, with innocent but fatal accidents, with everything from disease to car bombings? (Am reading the new Targeted: Beirut by Jack Carr and James M. Scott now, about the 1983 Marine barracks bombing and the beginning of terrorism. Along those evil lines, things aren’t getting much better, are they?)
Having never lived on land like the Texas Hill Country in South and Central Texas, I can’t understand how water can rise as high as quickly as it did in and around Kerr County this week to cause the death of more than 100.
Maybe you’re like me. Hard even to imagine.
I understand the power of water, the majesty of the stuff. I can see the Mississippi or the Red; when it’s angry, watch it move. Or even when it’s not angry.
I recommend three books, all tragic but true, all about the indifference and power of water:
The Johnstown Flood, the Incredible Story Behind One of the Most Devastating Disasters America Has Ever Known, by David McCullough, a dam-breaking tragedy in Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th century;
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry; and a favorite I’ve read twice,
Isaac’s Storm, A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Erik Larson, about the Galveston tragedy at the beginning of the 20th century.
From the titles, you know that none of these ends well. Nature’s power wins again.
But the flooding of the Guadalupe River and this weekend’s flash flood is a story of power AND speed, knowledge the locals lived with but, I’m not sure campers and vacationers did. I can’t imagine the terror of water moving and rising that fast, especially when you’re on unknown ground.
Because of geology and topography and the weather, Texas Hill Country has long been called Flash Flood Alley. I get it. And still, the July 4 event took by surprise many who live there, and many who didn’t, but who will now never go home. At least 27 of those who did not survive the swift and violent waters were campers at Camp Mystic, a private Christian summer camp for girls since 1926.
How can a human heart who knew any of those campers ever beat quite the same?
Then, consider this layer of grief: Nothing about the true Texas Hill Country is big-city. These are small towns. Kerrville. Ingram. Cow Creek and Comfort and Marble Falls.
Think Ruston and Haughton and Mansfield and Choudrant. Everybody knows everybody.
Any heart beating in South Central Texas knows someone who this weekend was lost in the flood. Some of them spoke to friends Friday, but then the weekend and …
This must be a kind of Grade A “trial by fire” that Peter and Paul wrote of in the New Testament, or Zechariah before them, when he declared we would be “refined” as silver and “tested” as gold, by a metaphorical fire.
This trial by fire was a trial by water, one that asks us to help with prayers or, if nothing else, with money or muscle or presence.
Topography and geology and climate and flash floods we can all, with education, come to understand. But living with hope despite a steady barrage of tragedy is a bit beyond the capability of the human heart. To soldier own successfully requires the power of the divine.
It’s been 10 years or so since Kyle Porter, then a golf writer for CBS Sports and now a part of NormalSport.com, wrote of his part in a story similar to this weekend’s. He and his wife were the young parents of three. Two of those children are living. The third, the baby sister of a son and a daughter, was stillborn.
He wrote these words on the intersection of day-to-day life invaded by the exhausting, gripping pain that he experienced then, that many in Texas are experiencing now, that many of us have — or will — experience.
For a lot of us (myself included), Christianity has come easy. There has been no suffering. There has been no pain. There have been few questions. There has been no reason to not trust God and to not call ourselves Christians.
And now there is.
Now we have known unimaginable depths. The sorrow that flowed that week is an unspeakable thing. And we can truthfully say that the Lord is good in both, if not greater in the sorrow. That was what we tried to point to all week.
That we do not hope in our children. That we do not hope in each other. That we do not hope in our friends or our families or in anything outside the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. That is all. In Christ alone. This was a wild reminder of that. One we didn’t want, but always need.
My friend Nathan said that until that week, loving the Lord amid sorrow this deep was only a theory for many of us. Putting a baby in the ground makes it real. And not just for us. Our friends mourned deeply with us, which was as rich a reminder as I’ve ever had of God’s purpose in having a deep community of friends.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu