Pubdate: Sat, 12 May 2001 Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN) Copyright: 2001 Star Tribune Contact: http://www.startribune.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/266 Author: David Montgomery, The Washington Post Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?172 (Peruvian Aircraft Shooting) MISSIONARY LOOKS FOR GOOD IN DEATH OF WIFE, CHILD FRUITPORT, Mich. -- The missionary is home from Peru, in the church of his parents and grandparents, to preach the good news about the bullet that was fired by God at his wife and baby. Standing at the pulpit in late April, he pulls out a list of evidence pointing to God's hand at work. Actually it's only half the list. There's no time for the whole thing, says Jim Bowers. "You tell me if this was God or not," he says to the congregation of 1,200. He is all tautness and understatement. Imagine a younger Joe Friday, preaching. Just the facts, ma'am. At the front of the church, a single white casket contains the bodies. Jim transports the congregation back with him to the Cessna 185 float plane, high above the green jungle and the brown river. Gunfire is spraying the plane from behind. The pilot is screaming into the radio, "They're killing us!" Jim's son, Cory, 6, is very quiet as pilot Kevin Donaldson executes an emergency dive to the river. "Of the many bullets that penetrated the aircraft," Jim tells the congregation, "not one of them hit Cory or me, despite the fact that one of the first made a big hole in the windshield in front of my head. None of them incapacitated Kevin completely." He lists detail after detail of the miraculous landing on the water, the miraculous rescue. It sure seems someone was watching over them. Yet Veronica (Roni) Bowers, 35, and the couple's 7-month-old daughter, Charity, lay dead in the back seat, killed instantly by one round. Didn't God care about them? "Would you say that was a stray bullet?" Jim asks. The church is absolutely still. This is the question people have been wrestling with. Think of possible explanations for the bullet: bad luck, official incompetence, the Devil's marksmanship. Camus would say it proves the absurdity of the universe. Jim's voice gets so low that people strain forward to hear. "That was a sovereign bullet." There is quiet weeping. Not tears of grief, tears of joy. Jim reports he and Cory feel "an inexplicable peace." And he asks one more question. "How could something so terrible be good?" Quick Forgiveness Jim crawled out of the Amazon and into the middle of an international incident that U.S. and Peruvian diplomats are still sorting out. The Cessna was mistaken for a drug courier and shot down April 20 by a Peruvian air force jet, after an American surveillance team hired by the CIA located the small plane. The Americans say the Peruvians ignored warnings that the plane appeared innocent. The Peruvians say they followed proper procedures. For a day or two, Jim, 38, couldn't make sense of the bullet, and the hole it ripped in his family. Then he began to understand. Skeptics won't understand how he can so quickly say he forgives the Peruvians. "How could I not," Jim replies, "when God has forgiven me so much?" Roni forgives them, too, he says. Perhaps the skeptics have never journeyed to a town like this one in western Michigan, dominated by a yellow water tower with a smiley face, where acres of blueberries are grown. For generations, another significant export has been missionaries, special-delivered all around the world. They come from the churches that seem to be planted every few blocks. Many are what their members call "Bible-centered" churches. The words of the scriptures are literally true. The theory of evolution is false. Anyone who hasn't accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior is going to hell. If no one told them about Jesus -- tough luck. This is why these churches believe the stakes are so high in missionary work. "In west Michigan, this is the Bible Belt, and we're just inundated with this stuff," says Eric Strattan, associate pastor of Calvary Church, the independent Baptist congregation that sent the Bowerses to Peru. He means inundated in the best sense -- that the flood of believers can flow to other areas that are spiritually dry. For days, television trucks have camped outside the churches of the missionaries and their families, in Fruitport as well as Pensacola, Fla., near where Roni's parents live and where mother and daughter were buried. In life, Roni Bowers was an obscure example of the estimated 420,000 Christian missionaries worldwide. In death, her friends and pastors believe, she may achieve her greatest accomplishment. "God," says the Rev. Terry Fulk, missions pastor at Calvary, "is going to capitalize on this." A Family Mission He asked her on a date to go roller-skating. As a freshman at Piedmont Bible College in Winston-Salem, N.C., Roni had resolved to date only men who shared her aspiration to become a missionary. Jim, the son of Calvary missionaries, had grown up on the Amazon and wanted to return. When Jim ran out of money for college, he joined the Army to take advantage of the GI Bill. Roni also left school, and they married in 1985. After Jim's Army stint, they returned to Piedmont and worked, both graduating in 1993. After graduation, they joined Calvary. They also began to see fertility specialists, who told them Roni couldn't have children. They soon started the adoption process. The Bowerses built a houseboat, with help from Calvary members, because they intended this to be a family mission. In fall 1994, Cory was born to a teenage mother in Michigan. Roni and Jim soon adopted him. They were getting ready to launch the houseboat on the Amazon in summer 1997 when Roni felt unusually tired. She discovered she was pregnant. God was answering her prayers again. She bought a pile of maternity clothes. Ten weeks later, after an agonizing labor whose pain she knew would be for naught, she lost the baby. She felt her faith seriously shaken. Eventually she recovered. She figured this had been the great trial of her life. Teaching, and Tests The white houseboat would chug 200 miles downstream from the city of Iquitos, Peru, and back. Jim and Roni had a huge file aboard, with one index card for every villager they knew along that stretch of river. They'd pull up to a village of subsistence farmers and fishermen. They'd play with the children, teach the adults, help to build churches and a Bible institute. In the evenings Jim would hold services in a large common building. But there were also moments of doubt, tests of faith. Two hundred miles of river, with 56 villages to keep in touch with, and more to discover, turned out to be a huge territory. The physical and medical needs of some of the poorest villages seemed so great. The Rev. Dave Buckley, associate pastor of a Michigan church, shot some videotape of his visit. Most of it includes amusing or uplifting scenes of frontier spirituality. But at one point Jim tells the camera of his concern about being spread so thin that they're not accomplishing enough. Charity was born to another Michigan teenager last September. By December, the blond, pudgy girl was a hit among the women of the Amazon. Now Roni and Charity are in the white casket, and Jim sees the work of God. "I believe God directly intervened to spare Cory and me because he still has some sort for work for us to accomplish," says Jim. He confesses he doesn't know if he is equipped for the work, but says that is when God's influence is strongest. Two days later, up in the church's sound booth, a 28-minute videotape from the Amazon is spooling with the sound off. Roni is on-screen, addressing the camera, in a scene shot three weeks before her death. Roni has just been asked if there's anything church members back home can pray for. "From a wife and mother's point of view, my main concern is always our health and our safety. The Lord's been very good. We've been healthy and safe. We continue to pray for that." - --- MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe