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October 27, 1989 was a horrific day for most residents of Kamloops, B.C. A loaded semi-trailer, brakes failing, careened down Highway 1, mistakenly took the route through town, missing the bypass, and crashed in front of Royal Inland Hospital. The driver and four others were killed in the wreck.
Hospital workers peered at the wreckage, stunned to immobility. People saw flames shooting from the truck, heard screams for help from the trapped driver, but were helpless to save him.
A friend of mine sat in his vehicle about a block from the carnage and heard the screams: “Oh God, save me!” Looking up, he was surprised to see someone in the truck cab with the driver. After what seemed an eternity, the driver’s screams subsided, and he died. Later, as fireworkers removed the body, they found just the driver.
Questions abounded following this event. Why had the runaway truck been on Columbia Street hill? Why did the brakes not work? Weren’t the highway signs clear enough? What about the two innocent children and the woman who had been caring for them, all of whom had been killed in this accident? Why had God let this happen?
As pastor of a Christian church in the town at the time, most of these questions were asked of me – and by me. That evening, as I returned home from helping a friend on my day off, the radio told the story, and in my mind came the question, “Was anyone from our church in the accident?”
When I entered the door to our house, my wife’s face told me the answer. A woman whom we had met at a wedding about two months earlier was one of the victims, and two children in her care had also perished. Would I call the husband? Everything in me said, “No, let someone else go. I only met the man. I barely knew his wife. All we’d done at the wedding was sit at the same table and discuss the fact that both husband and wife were from Germany.” The excuses fell flat.
I called and went to visit the man, left with two daughters, one eight, the other 11. He said, “My wife did not deserve to die. Why did God take her? She was a good woman, and my children and I needed her.”
I recall telling him something about God understanding loss because God’s only son Jesus had also been killed. I’m not sure if what I said was fully comprehended, but it opened a window. The husband responded that he had grown up Catholic and had a deep respect for God. We had common ground from which to begin.
As we planned his wife’s memorial service, his big concern was that we not prepare for a large crowd. “We have only a few friends, and our neighbours might come.” So we planned for 50 people. Women from the church would provide a luncheon afterward, and half the sanctuary would be set up with tables so we wouldn’t have to spend time rearranging things once the service was over. The service time was set for 1:00 p.m.
On the day of the service, the tables and chairs were set up by our custodian in the morning, and I went home early for lunch. Anticipating a small group of people, I arrived back at the church at 12:30 p.m. to make final preparations. The parking lot was packed, the church was full, and our custodian was dragging chairs up from the basement. Very quickly we abandoned thoughts of keeping half the sanctuary for luncheon tables. By 1:10, there were well over 500 people in a building which had a capacity of 265. The doors were open; people were outside, on stage beside me, standing everywhere.
I had chosen to speak on Jesus’ words from John 14:1 in the Bible: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in Me.” Media people were there. It felt like the whole town had come to mourn and to try to make some sense of a community tragedy.
The presence of God was evident throughout the afternoon. Because of the time I had spent with the husband and wife two months prior to the accident, I was able to affirm their belief in God and their appreciation for the Bible. The Bible verse I had chosen challenged people to not only believe in God, which most folk do when tragedy hits, but to trust Jesus, God’s Son. Finally, there was encouragement to face this event together, because it had affected us all. What had been planned as a small service became the community’s outpouring of frustration, anger, grief and pain and a time of seeking for hope.
That afternoon, when all the people had left, and I spoke with the bereaved husband, he broke down: “I can’t believe our lives have influenced so many others. I hope my wife knows what happened here today.”
When I arrived home, there was another surprise – a call from a local newspaper reporter. She asked me to clarify my comment that we needed a relationship with Jesus and not just to believe that God exists. In her article the next day, a half-page spread entitled “Pastor Gives Hope”, she reported what I told her on the phone: Many people instinctively reach out to God when a difficult circumstance arises, but to have a relationship with God one must come to grips with who Jesus is. As God’s Son and as a perfect human being, by dying Jesus made it possible for all human beings to have a living relationship with God, the Father. Knowing Jesus gives hope to all who believe in Him. Relying on Jesus as “the way, the truth and the life” provides comfort and perspective following a tragedy such as this.
Years have come and gone since that day. For several years, there was always a ready welcome in the grieving husband’s home, or a pleasant “Hi” as he brought his girls to girls’ club at our church. Often we would have coffee and discuss the impact of the loss of his dearest friend.
What is remarkable in my memory is this: The husband prayed to receive Jesus Christ about two years later as he lay dying of cancer on a hospital bed. In that moment, when he asked Christ to become his personal Saviour, he affirmed not only that God exists, but also that Jesus had died to forgive his sins. It was a personal commitment to Jesus, God’s Son. Today, for this couple, the tragedy is behind them, but God’s hand through it continues to be evident as I remember.
The story is not finished. About four years ago, I was asked to speak at Camp Evergreen, a Christian camp in Alberta. There I met a couple, cooking for the weekend, whose last name was the same as the driver of the truck. As we turned the hot dogs, they asked where I had lived earlier. When I mentioned Kamloops, they asked about “the accident at the hospital”.
As I told them the above story, in much greater detail, they got sidetracked when I told about my friend’s experience of seeing a second person in the flaming truck. As we talked, they told me that the driver of the truck had grown up in a Christian family and they were concerned about his spiritual well-being. To them, the second person in the truck must have been an angel. They were also excited to hear that the trucker had screamed to God to “save me”. From their perspective, he was reaching out to God, whom he had embraced in his childhood. We cried together and thanked God for our meeting years after the accident. Now they had a different perspective too. The trucker was their brother.
Reuben Pauls is now pastor of River of Life Church in Sorrento, B.C.
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