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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
The grief. The guilt. The giant fog.
Matt Collins can’t help but experience the catastrophic Texas flooding — especially the deaths of children in a sudden natural disaster — through a deeply personal lens.
“It’s hard to see this situation in Texas and not immediately go back to, ‘What was that like for me?’” said Collins, who with his wife, Macy, founded the Magnolia Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit that supports parents who lose a child.
Hattie Jo Collins, Matt and Macy’s 4-year-old daughter, was one of five children and 14 adults killed March 3, 2020, when an EF4 tornado battered their home city of Cookeville, Tennessee, 80 miles east of Nashville.
This past week, Fourth of July flooding in the Texas Hill Country claimed at least 120 lives — including dozens of young campers — and sent Matt Collins’ mind racing back to the night Hattie died.
“I just imagine that there’s probably a lot of guilt that the parents have,” Collins said. “Obviously, nobody sends their kids to camp and expects floodwaters to take them away. So it’s not like the parents did anything wrong.”
But that won’t stop mothers and fathers from asking “What if?” questions.
What could I have done? Why wasn’t I there? Why did I send my daughter to camp in the first place?
In Collins’ case, he’s thought “a million times” about the way he held Hattie as the storm raged.
“I held her kind of across my body,” he recalled. “If I had held her straight up and down and kind of enveloped her, would things have been different? You kind of go through that scenario of, if I had done this and not this, what would have happened?
“And I’m sure,” he added, “there are parents that are thinking, ‘OK, we were on the edge of even sending our kid to camp, and we sent them to camp, and this happened,’ like it’s their fault.”
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Shutterstock photo
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 