By Chris Turner
Tennessee Baptist Convention
One moment it was a blustery late November evening secluded in the Smoky Mountains; the next a fiery hell. And it all changed in the time it takes to draw a breath.
Somewhere along the way I became a disaster chaser. That was never my intention; it just worked out that way. My background is rooted in journalism and at one point I was an overseas correspondent for the International Mission Board. I’ve chased hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. I’ve never seen the ravages of fire until those in Sevier County, Tennessee.
Baptist and Reflector Editor Lonnie Wilkey and I dashed over to Sevierville less than 24 hours after Gatlinburg had been evacuated and fire was sweeping across the mountains. By God’s grace we awoke to a drenching rain. Our objective: connect with disaster relief teams and better understand what the human needs are going to be. Along the day’s journey we spent time at Rocky Top Sports World, normally an athletic center with multiple courts, but transformed into a makeshift shelter for hundreds of displaced people.
And that’s where I met Joyce. She and her husband are fortunate to be alive. As we sat waiting on cellphones to charge, I asked if she would share her story.
Sharing her story
“I heard a popping sound near the window Monday night and looked outside,” she said. “Embers were falling like rain. No one ever warned us to evacuate but then again the fire was nowhere near where we lived. The wind was whipping at about 80 mph and it’s like it carried the fire up and over the mountain.”
In fact, it did. The fire jumped several mountains and nestled in the hills surrounding Gatlinburg, and in Joyce’s backyard. She and her husband wet their hair and their clothes and scrambled to grab their Bible and car keys — and made a break for it. They tried to cautiously bolt through blinding smoke and down the winding road away from the fire only to find they were driving into the heart of it. The wind was sweeping the fire up the hill rather than down.
The hope of making it out suddenly died when a tree fell across the road and left them cut off. They raced back up the hill to their condo and were thinking the pool might be their only hope of salvation. Just then, lights from a four-wheel drive fire truck emerged through the smoke to rescue them. They barely made it down. The windshield wipers melted on the truck by the time they got to safety.
‘He delivered us’
“God saved us,” she said. “There was no way we were going to get out. We kept praying and He delivered us.”
They lost everything but that Bible and the clothes on their backs.
Covering a disaster is a two-edged sword. The looks on the faces of people who have lost everything and the despondency in their eyes never leave you. I’ll never forget Joyce’s face, or the face of the old Honduran woman who clung to the root ball of a large tree as it swept violently down a raging Aguan River, or the filthy faces of teenaged boys digging out of the debris after an earthquake in Peru.
But I’ll also never forget the stories of God’s providential care either. There was no doubt in Joyce’s mind that God arrived just in time through the smoke in a hard charging pickup truck. She and her husband had life, and salvation, and were saved. She didn’t know what they were going to do, but she knew that if God could save them from the fire on the mountain, then He could meet their needs moving forward.
As I walked around the smoldering ruins of Roaring Fork Baptist Church, Gatlinburg, and past the slab and rubble of neighboring houses, it struck me as odd that not everything in the fire’s path burned to the ground.
In fact, it is incomprehensible to understand how one house stood without a single shingle melting and the house 30 feet away on the next lot over was reduced to ashes. It definitely makes one think about those Scripture passages that speak of things in our lives that will be turned to ash and that which has permanence.
And it makes one think how, in a moment, one can go from living the blustery life of this world with all its distracting activities to eternity.
And it all changes in the time it takes to draw a breath.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story first appeared in the Baptist and Reflector.
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