Portland in a nutshell

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Adventures 005: Was that Rain?

Was that rain? I can’t tell….but my gut instinct is to mutter prayers underneath my breath begging for the answer to be no…

The girl only appears to be unconscious–in fact, she is wide awake, but absolutely exhausted and almost collapsed under the weight of the recent chain of events that led us to this moment. She feels like a ton of bricks in my arms as my elbows are locked under her armpits, and I’m trying my best to scoop up her upper body as I drag her along the sand and out of the ocean’s water. I haven’t had too many negative experiences with the Gulf, but this isn’t going to create a fond memory…
The previous ten minutes run through my mind. Why is this happening? We have 3 medics on the beach, and I’m not one of them. The primary medic is attending to a high school boy who broke his arm while diving into the hard, crusty beach. The two backups are both attending to heat-stroke victims, one of which was carried away moments ago in an ambulance.
A few minutes ago, I was standing on the beach and surveying the scene when I saw a young lady dragging another one through the waves on the shallow ocean bottom. While sprinting into the waves from the shore, she had taken a bad misstep and twisted her knee. It will come out later that she tore every major ligament and had to go through hours of surgery. That’s really irrelevant at this point, as she’s  limp and covered in sand and salt water. Her friend is much more panicked than she is, and I can’t afford to stress my inexperience over the pressing need.
What am I going to do? What are we going to do? There are over 800 youth and adults on the beach, and the dark clouds forming above don’t look encouraging or promising.
Was that rain?
An older lady screams down the beach. There’s a young girl lying on the beach in front of her, beet red and almost completely non-responsive. I instinctively grab my walkie talkie–not because it’s instinctual for me to react that way, but because 8 weeks of summer camp have trained me to realize how “cool” it looks to respond in such a way–and I call out for another staffer to attend to the issue. Another ambulance is called, and it seems like things are coming to a halt.
And then the unthinkable happens. Thunder, lightning, and the roof of Creation lets out a solid downpour, turning the massive crowd into a frenzied mob. The facilities are about a 1/4 mile away, just on the other side of the beach road and about a block further North. With no consideration for the heavy traffic on the beach front road, the mob begins to charge their way back across to the camp, many of them in full sprint.  I remain to make sure the people in crisis get on their way to medical care and then, with the help of a few staffers, we make sure the beach is clear.
We nervously pull up the rear and heard everyone towards the camp at a fervent pace. As we stumble into the office, where several staffers are collapsed on the floor, we get a report that one kid fell on the road while running back in the rain and has some pretty deep scrapes on his arms and legs.

Why do crazy things happen? We have worked all summer for weeks on end with no sort of major accident, and then the world falls apart on us. Why?

Is there a rhyme or reason to the day-to-day happenings of life? When Paul says that all things work for the glory of the Creator, does that mean we’re supposed to force injury and disaster into trite spiritual sayings? Or is something else going on? Would Paul say that there’s a silver lining in everything? Or is that folk wisdom?
Perhaps we just have to love God and love people. Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people. Sometimes love wins, and sometimes people lose hope. We need love to win more often, but we don’t need forced, trite spiritual sayings. If we learn to see all of life as spiritual and all of Creation as the Creator’s domain, then we can’t help but see opportunities for peace in all of life. Shalom. Wholeness. And it shines most evidently in the midst of the most obvious brokenness.