Back to Bassam - The Shack

I've written before about the terrorist attack that I experienced at Grand Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire just over 18 months ago on March 13, 2016. I was with 2 friends at the beach when armed terrorists attacked. We hid in a an unfinished room by the beach for 2 hours, with heavy shooting outside before being rescued. 12 people including 2 soldiers and 2 terrorists lost their lives within 100 yards of where we were hiding.

 
The trauma was deep and the healing came slowly over the course of months. But I really thought I was past it all when I reached the one year anniversary this year.

Then 2 weeks ago I headed up to the small village of Todnauberg, Germany for a retreat in a beautiful setting with lots of trails for walking around a lovely mountain village. In the first session of the retreat, we did Lectio Divina on 1 Kings 19. This is a classic “retreat for tired people” passage. Elijah had his success with the prophets of Baal, then is threatened and runs for his life. Exhausted, God ministers to him with food and rest and then finally meets him in the cave with the “still, small voice”.

In Lectio, you listen to the passage, three times and ask God to speak to you. So I settled in to listen, and was struck in verse 3 when it said “Elijah was afraid and ran for his life." This jumped out at me in a way it never had before. I knew what it was like to have people wanting to kill me, to run and hide. This was the terror attacks at Bassam, March 13, 2016 - all over again.

I thought to myself, “Oh, I thought we were done with Bassam.”

I kept listening and focusing. In verse 7, the angel comes to Elijah and says, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” God came to him to restore him and prepare him for the long journey yet ahead.

Elijah travels 40 days to Mount Sinai, where I guess he thought he could find God. God asks him what he is doing there and he replies,

“I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. But the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars, and killed every one of your prophets. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.” (19:10 and :14)

I’d never picked up on it before, but it seemed there was a real tone of accusation against God. I zealously served you and now I’m the only one and they want to kill me. Why are you allowing this?

This rang very true to me and took me back to all the hard questions I wrestled with in the months after Grand Bassam:

• Where were you, God . . . . while all this was happening? Were you really there with us in our cave while the attack was happening outside . . . 300 bullets, 12 killed nearby?
• Was an angel standing in front of the door?
• Yes, you protected our lives, but we still experienced it. Why did you let this happen? Why didn’t you keep us away from the events that day? Like Elijah, “I served you faithfully, God.”

Next on the retreat schedule was a time of silence from noon to 6 pm. A nap was suggested if we were tired. When I laid down, I decided to read the passage again, starting out in the preceding passage, where Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal.

We had also read Ecclesiastes 3 that morning and I recalled the various times “to weep, to mourn, to keep silence” and the final verse (15) that says “that which is already has been and God seeks what has been driven away.”

God was seeking me just as he did with Elijah.

I slept from 12:30 until almost 3. And then got up and then got up to explore the trails around the valley. There is a high trail that circles the Todtnauberg “ski resort” valley. I followed it and eventually I sat on a bench and journaled most of what is above.

Then I got up to walk and pray. In my mind, the answers to the questions went back to the dream that I had back 3 months after Bassam - on June 6. I woke up from that dream with assurance that God had been there and that he was distressed and saddened by what happened to me. It was so clear at the time that I wrote the dream into a note on my phone.

So my first impulse was to pull out my phone and reread the dream.

As I walked, God said to me, “The dream is important, but we’re going to be back further. We’re going back there, back to Bassam.”
And He took me back there. I was walking on the trail in Todtnauberg, but also transported back to Bassam.

I've told the story of the attack now several times, three times in fairly great detail to large groups. It has become internalized and I can tell the facts fairly easily.

But this time, it became clear that we were not just revisiting the facts, but the FEELINGS, my FEARS. So I reviewed the film in my mind, and forced myself to linger, not just on the images and sounds, but to remember what I was feeling at each point.

I kept walking and could see the trail moving behind me and hear the crunch of the gravel, even see others ahead of me. I came to a bend that went down and decided to take it. It turned through a stand of trees and the lack of sunlight made it noticeably colder there - as we plunged into the cave of fears. Tears ran down my face and into my mouth - salty on my tongue.

Suddenly, I walked out of the woods into the warm sunlight and the memories were over over.

I tried to rush ahead in my mind to the dream, but God made me linger on the days following Bassam,

• Riding my bike the day afterwards across the bridge, my limbs sluggish and my body sore from being in fight or flight mode. And being glad to be alive.
• A few days later, riding again, and wondering “What if I never come back to life (emotionally) after this?” The attack was like a big rock in path that I could not see around.
• The debrief on a wednesday and then finally on the 4th day crying for the first time, sobbing when I learned that 2 had died in the pool near us.
• The beautiful Egg Ceremony
• Returning to Cameroon and regaining some semblance of normalcy.

By this point in my walk, I was nearing the road back to our lodging. I stopped at the Glocklehof Cafestube and had a nice piece of Black Forest cake and coffee, sitting out on the patio and enjoying the sunlight.

I found the Dream write-up on my phone and read it.

I had forgotten some of it, including the entire first section about my new job.

Part 2 was about God taking away my pain, pain that looked like rocks, that I was trying to put behind a wall. And suddenly in the dream, the rocks were gone.

Then part 3, where I saw the events happen, in a symbolic way, with a Watcher standing outside and watching what was going on - deeply saddened by it.

The note also had a quote from the book Failure to Scream: “The Trauma wounds your spirit. We need the Spirit to heal us.”
I got up from the cafe and went back to the retreat. That evening when I shared with our group, the leader asked me, how does this experience make you feel?

My response was, “like God loves me.”

I wrote in my journal, “God entered into the pain and fear of Bassan with me today!”

As I look back, it seemed very much like the book “The Shack” where God takes the main character to the site where his daughter was murdered and WALKS WITH HIM THROUGH IT.

All in all, it was a good day, but also very intense. Like I had had emotional surgery! I took the picture below the next morning as the sun rose over the valley!