hearing the song “be thou my vision” brings mixed emotions for me. it’s one of my favorites and it’s really pretty. it also was the theme song of our church’s conference convention where i last saw most of the former conference officers alive.

on dec. 2, 2004, our georgia cumberland conference president, vice president for administration, assistant to the president and communication director were killed when the conference’s twin engine Cessna 421 crashed because of engine failure just outside collegedale, tenn. the plane’s pilot also died. it actually crashed about a mile from my parents’ house. my mom called me while i was at work in dalton because she had seen it. right after that, we heard that it was our conference’s plane.

i was one of two adventists working in the newsroom at the daily citizen, and he and i were on the phone all afternoon trying to find out additional details. at first, all we heard was that our president and vice president were on board and had been killed. i was sad because our president was so charismatic and outgoing. he loved god, and he loved the seventh-day adventist church. they all did.

my first thought, though, was if jamie was on the plane. jamie was our communication director and, as a graduate of the school of journalism and communication at southern adventist university, i knew him pretty well. we weren’t “friends”, but we saw each other fairly often at events and always chatted.

that afternoon, we found out that jamie had been on the plane and hadn’t made it. the only person who survived was the co-pilot, who was hospitalized but released the next day.

some may wonder why, after two years, i still get sad when i hear a song or think about our officers. i may not have been close friends, but i knew them and attended college with one of them. they were part of our seventh-day adventist family. they were our leaders. they loved their church and its members, and they died on their way to church meetings in knoxville. they died serving god. none of the 29,000 members of our church will ever forget what happened. it’s a tragedy that i think brought us all together even more as a church.