A Natural Grace

by Dee Wade

Three of us were walking along the state park beach on Fort Morgan Peninsula, a spit of land jutting into the mouth of Mobile Bay. The other two are Jane Hines, our editor, and Samford Turner, our guide. We admire sand dunes that have been left alone to do the good work sand dunes do. Along the water's edge, Samford begins to identify seashells. Then he fills our hands with tiny, perfectly shaped sand dollars. He tells us that many people can't see the small ones, white shell against white sand.

I tell him what Bert Eyster — formerly of the Bluegrass, now happily situated in L.A. (Lower Alabama) — said to me the other day. Bert named some of the major rivers flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, like the Appalachicola, the Black Water, and the Perdido. Those are rivers darkly stained with tannin, almost black, flowing out of thick swamps across some of the whitest beaches in the world. And long stretches of the Gulf are noted for beautifully clear, turquoise colored water. The contrasts are amazing, he said.

Samford Turner,
South Alabama Executive

An interesting twist on cause and effect is what I'm looking for, because I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, but Samford sticks soberly with the facts. It's a colorful coincidence, he allows, but the rivers are responsible for only some of the sand. The vast majority of it is brought in by the predominately west-flowing currents along the Gulf beaches, he says. Counter-clockwise the sand moves, up the Gulf side of Florida to Panama City to Pensacola to the Mobile Bay and into Mississippi and onward from there. The sand of the Gulf Shores does not stay put. It's in perpetual motion.

Samford says that you notice it most on the barrier islands, which are made mostly of sand and are always under construction. You can look at old maps and see how much they have moved to the west over the relatively brief time that maps of the Gulf have been around. The sand is eroded on the eastern end only to be deposited on the other end. Something is lost, and something is gained, one grain of sand at a time. So if you insist on building your house on the sand, you just need to be flexible. And be willing to change your zip code every so often.

One such barrier island is Dauphin Island. As a child of Mobile, Samford spent his summers there growing up. He knows that island as intimately as country boys farther inland know the rivers, woods, and fields of their childhood. He entertains us with a tale about flounder gigging on Dauphin Island one summer evening.

For the uninitiated, such as myself, flounder gigging involves wading in the shallows of an ocean bay, with a single-pronged, barbless spear in one hand, and a specially adapted Coleman lantern in the other. Flounder like to bury themselves in the warm sand near the shore, with only their eyes protruding, waiting to ambush unsuspecting prey. Another sea creature with that same habit is the sting ray. So the flounder gig with no barb seems like a good idea. If you spear a large sting ray, you want to let go of it as quickly as possible before that tail of his does serious harm to your ankles.

Samford sees the distinctive pattern flounder make in the sand, and gigs. The fish is huge, and Samford struggles mightily to bring it to shore. It would probably set a new Dauphin Island record if Samford had time to register it somewhere, but he doesn't because this baby needs a good cleaning and filleting and setting on ice while the fire is made in prelude to the best eating ever.

A few months after that conversation, more than a little sand is shifted. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita do unbelievable damage to the Gulf coast. As one taking offense that such storms would attack his native landscape, Samford responds with a fury of his own. He enters the stricken areas as soon as possible, among the first officially Presbyterian feet on the ground, especially in Mississippi. He visits every Presbyterian church along the coastline. He contacts pastors when they are available, ascertains their whereabouts when not, and assesses the extent of destruction to church buildings, offering gifts of presence and support.

It took a while before Samford could check on Dauphin Island. When he finally made the crossing, he found it all but wiped clean, especially on its leading, westward edge. "Put all the hurricanes together that have touched Dauphin Island in my lifetime," Samford said, "and Katrina destruction is greater." Sometimes the sand moves along the coast slowly, grain by grain, from Florida to Mexico. And sometimes the sand moves in great volume at breakneck speed, picked up all at once and set back down miles and miles away.

In a sense, Samford took the storms personally, not that they were about him or about us, but because they affected him and us, affected our people in our synod, their houses of residence and their houses of worship. As Terry Newland said, "as far as Samford is concerned, if one person suffers, all suffer." The windward side of the Synod of Living Waters has been hammered, our south forty laid low. That's getting close to home, which, as we know, is where charity begins. Samford taught us that lesson in flesh and blood terms. Without calling any attention to himself, he organized relief efforts and directed the traffic of Presbyterians streaming into the region to help. Because our representative and our friend Samford was there, so were the rest of us. It is a time of natural grace.

The truth of the matter is that a synod like ours is not just a governing body of our church, a judicatory, a geographical slice of ecclesiastical bureaucracy. It is a relationship. Because it springs from the covenant we all share with God through Jesus Christ, it is a relationship with sacred overtones. Our caring for one another is God's caring. When God acts through people like Samford Turner, we take care of our own, and who are we but God's own?