Anna Mitchael is trained as an Acts of Mercy responder and is based in Central Texas. She wrote this call to action following the July 4th floods in Kerr County, Texas:
25 years ago, when I showed up as an out-of-stater at UT Austin with about 48,000 other students, I was jealous of the camp kids. I knew 3 other people on campus. The camp kids, it seemed, knew everyone. Every day I learned something new about life in Texas, but this part of the culture remained a mystery…. So, you go away for a couple weeks every summer? Every year? You sing songs and dance? You bond with these people for life?
In a time and town when everyone wanted to be cool, camp conversations were the one place where no one cared how they appeared. Yes, they did sing. They did dance. They did run free every summer for as far back as they could remember.
As it ended up, I married a camp kid. We had our own kids. Now the older ones go to camp. This thing I always felt outside of, I’m still outside. But I know how to pack a trunk, and I’ve watched my kids come home with a faraway, wistful look for a world I’ll never know. Until last week, I let myself believe that the world was untouchable. I told myself I was giving them this thing I wished for: a couple weeks where the world can’t reach you. Where you are protected from harsh
realities of real life.
Never has there been a disaster or a child who passed, that did not warrant falling to our knees, crying out, overflowing with confusion and regret for the incomprehensible waste. On July 4th, when Texas—then the country, then the world—woke to news of the floods, the collective chord was soul-shaking: What if it was my child, my family, how will these people who have lost so much go on?
Another war would have been upsetting. More news of drone attacks. Innocents killed by governments run wild was, of course, nothing anyone wanted to wake up and see. But over the last few years, as stories stacked on top of themselves and media outlets attempted to outdo each other with horrors of the world, calluses had formed. This news pierced through the tough skin to places of vulnerability. If summer camp—a place literally built to be a bubble—is not out of harm’s way, we must admit that nowhere is.
Part of the American life and lie is that this isn’t true. We tell ourselves what we buy or do, the policies we align with, and all the ways we strive can somehow keep us elevated, on higher ground, and out of harm’s way. The lives lost in Kerr County, the people picked up by the river, and precious children swept from cabins in the middle of the night—where they should have felt safest—don’t let us hide. They demand that we see the world and make a decision about how we will live in it.
Now that we’ve had this sliver of truth pierce through layers of comfort and distance we had constructed, what will we do? If we wait long enough, life will go back to normal. As days and weeks pass, the grief will settle into a shape that can be contained. Slowly, we can find our way back into routines that keep us busy enough to ignore the pain of this world—the heartache and brokenness—in faraway countries and in our own backyards.
The other option? We let it change us. Instead of sitting back while new callouses form, we can let this loss that so deeply ripped into us keep us open. Then we can dare to walk through this broken world with hearts exposed, looking to meet others in their pain, offering news of the same rope each of us has been thrown.
As believers, we are the perpetual out-of-staters, outsiders. You’ve read the Scripture and heard it countless times—in the world but not of it. We might know in our minds that only one camp, the eternal one, offers any of us true safety. But do we live it? We’ve sang the songs, danced the dances, known the love. But do we share it?
Let this be a reminder of our great opportunity—the gift woven into this daunting walk on Earth—to bond with people over much more than just this life.
