You’ll be okay

BY AMY WILKINSON ’04 Photographs by KEVIN FISCUS

The fire in Paradise left widespread areas of devastation, but Brown is seeing signs of life and new growth.

rom the driver’s seat of his Honda Odyssey—with F flames advancing all around and traffic at a standstill—Brad Brown placed two phone calls: The first to his 16-year-old son to tell him he loved him; the second to a friend to pass along his bank account information and ask that they take care of his son and 13-year-old daughter if he didn’t make it out alive.

Affairs in order—or as in order as they could be given the circumstances—the Feather River Hospital chaplain hit the minivan’s gas pedal, propelling himself, a community member, and three critical patients from the hospital through what Brown describes as a “wall of flame,” praying for a clearing on the other side.

“Everybody’s scared, including me,” Brown, a 1998 theology graduate, recalls. “You just didn’t have an option.”

After several harrowing seconds plunged into near-darkness, the vehicle finally re-emerged into the eerie light of day, with a course set for a Kmart parking lot where Cal Fire had instructed residents of Paradise, California, to congregate for safety. Once at the parking lot, hours would tick by before a sheriff was able to escort Brown and a few other hospital employees with evacuated patients in tow to Enloe Medical Center in nearby Chico. Far enough from the inferno, Brown got a cell signal and called his kids: Son Jaron and daughter Alina had made it out and were safe. Brown would later learn that their home was the only one spared in

Melea was a math major at WWU. RIGHT: The Browns— including son Jaron and daughter Alina— enjoy family time together. Jaron is now a WWU freshman engineering student.

their neighborhood. Ninety-one percent of the houses in Paradise burned.

In the weeks to come, the Camp Fire would be declared the most destructive in California’s history, burning some 153,000 acres and destroying nearly 19,000 buildings.

A near-death experience like Brown’s would shake even the most steadfast of souls. But for the then-42-year-old, it paled in comparison to the tragedy he had endured just five months earlier: the death of his wife, Melea (Spencer) Brown ’97.

College sweethearts, the two met at Walla Walla University, and to hear Brown tell it, he had to do some persuading to get the mathematics major to go out with him. She eventually acquiesced, however, and the two were married in 1996. They had two children and did stints in Michigan and Washington before moving to Montana. It was in their kitchen in Montana that Melea heard a voice. It told her, “You’re going to move to California. You have cancer. You need the resources that California offers. You’ll be okay.”

She kept this disquieting message to herself, and two months later, Brown received a call from the HR director at Feather River Hospital offering him a position as the director of chaplaincy services. After much prayer, the couple decided to move their family to Paradise. Three weeks after they arrived, 37-yearold Melea was diagnosed with stage four

colon cancer and given a month to live.

Despite the dire prognosis, doctors started her on an aggressive treatment plan, and Melea put her faith in God.

“She was a statistician by profession, and she just said, ‘I’m the outlier,’” Brown recalls. “And she believed it. She actually made it six years. It was a really long, hard journey.”

Nearing the end of her life, Melea came to understand that God’s earlier promise—“You’ll be okay”—meant that her kids would be okay. She learned just how true those words would be when her youngest, Alina, received an award at her eighth grade graduation.

“She ended up being the only student to get this merit scholarship for being the best well-rounded kid spiritually, emotionally, and academically,” Brown explains. “I came home and told Melea about it. She passed away five days later. It was just like God confirmed in her mind that, ‘Hey, your journey’s done.’”

And so, five months later, when Brown found himself trapped in his minivan surrounded by flames, he had already come to intimately know and understand life’s fleeting nature.

“Once you come face-to-face with mortality, it doesn’t take away the sting necessarily the next time around, but I think you just have that experience to fall back on,” Brown says.

Though Brown considers his family

fortunate, the fire’s aftermath hasn’t been without trials. Even though their home was spared, the entire power grid in Paradise was destroyed by the blaze, making utilities virtually nonexistent. Brown and his two kids spent about three months living out of their RV, parked in a friend’s driveway waiting for the all-clear to move back into their house. And with Feather River Hospital badly damaged and closed for repairs and rebuilding, Brown shifted gears for a bit, focusing on chaplaincy work in the local clinics and speaking engagements on behalf of Adventist Health. His chaplain role ended at the beginning of summer 2020, and now he’s taking some time to focus on his family and run his dog-breeding business.

“You just have to trust God every day for your life and know that he’s got it,” Brown says reflecting on the last two years. “He can take you through anything if he chooses, or if he doesn’t, know that that was the timing and what was meant for your life. We just had to come to that conclusion as a family. And it’s taken trial to get there.”

Brown’s story of heroism and hope has been shared widely and inspired many: He was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of 2018, and his experience was chronicled in an episode of the docuseries Life on the Line called “For the Love of Paradise.”

Brown spoke with Westwind recently about the lessons he’s learned in finding hope and moving forward during hard times.

Westwind: Brad, you’ve faced some tremendous personal challenges with a level of hope and grace to which many would aspire. Do you consider yourself a fundamentally resilient person? From where does that resiliency come?

Brad Brown: I don’t know if I would have ever decided to become a resilient person, but, yes, I am. Christianity, if we really buy into it, is a resilient religion. Being a pastor and a chaplain and seeing people’s lives—and what works and doesn’t work—it’s really true. Christianity, at its core, is about hope, and hope brings resilience. The second coming of Christ makes everything else pay off in life, if we really believe that no matter what we go through, God is faithful to us and we’ve got a crown of righteousness and eternal life with him. It just helps you get through things that would be challenging if you didn’t have a post-this-world picture to look towards.

Westwind: Are there specific Bible verses or stories that you turn to during difficult times to remind you of God’s faithfulness?

Brown: With the fire, it was the story of Daniel and the three worthies in the fiery furnace. That story is so real and dramatic that you can see God’s hand is the only thing to preserve life. Unbeknownst to me, my kids were talking about that story while I was talking to the patients in my car about it. I often turn to it, just in life as well, because in Christianity, many times people anticipate God taking us out of everything—either you won’t go through it or he’ll pull you out [by sending] some type of salvation. And in reality, much of life isn’t that. It’s about going through it and realizing that God’s there with you. Knowing that he’s there with you, and having that peace, knowing that your future’s in his hands, I think is actually more comforting in many ways than just waiting, waiting, waiting for him to pull you out of it.

Westwind: Your story also illustrates the importance and necessity of community —your friends giving over their driveway for your RV, neighbors praying for your home to be spared—but with pandemic restrictions, many of us haven’t been able to see the friends and family who help give us strength. How do we continue to nurture those relationships at a time like this?

Brown: What I’ve noticed with patients is that they do better when they have support. For a lot of people, it’s their faith community. For some people, it’s family, which is great, but we live in a pretty fragmented family support world anymore. So many times, either they’re too far away, or they’re not what you would hope they would be. We do live in a very isolating world, just in general, and then COVID has definitely stepped that up. One of the things that I would say is, there’s always a workaround. Maybe it’s phone calls or texts, it’s a FaceTime, it’s social distancing but getting together like we do at churches. There are ways that people have found to find community, or if they haven’t, they should. evidence to suggest that the act of giving back can help people who are experiencing loss and grief. Have you found that to be true in your experience? Brown: [The idea that] in giving you will receive a spiritual blessing in turn is real. Especially if you have a loss, your compass for life just gets a little tweaked and so getting involved in giving, in finding meaning and purpose, it really does come back. After the fire, most people in health care or ministry just went above and beyond—it just wasn’t an option. If you care about people you gave and gave and gave. A lot of us didn’t sleep much for a few months. The needs were just beyond what we could do. It really was such a major catastrophe—it was apocalyptic, the way it played out. There’s no way one person or one church or one hospital could solve the problems that we had. It took a lot of people helping each other.

It was interesting: Most of the people that were helping had lost themselves. We did have some people come in from outside, but a lot of the support was from individuals that have lost, as well. They just were resilient enough to be able to come back, and those people actually were the ones that I think did the best when you look back.

Westwind: Conversely, giving back on a daily basis—like you did in your role as a chaplain—requires constantly depleting your own well for others. How do you go about refilling that well? What do you do

Westwind: There’s a lot of anecdotal

for self-care?

Watch the docuseries episode about Brown’s experiences, “For the Love of Paradise,” at

Brown: I taught classes for the hospital on self-care, and I’m not really good at it. It’s like the mechanic who has the worst car or the contractor who has the house that’s falling apart, right? In reality, I transitioned to better self-care when I moved from pastoral ministry into chaplaincy. We go through three or four years of chaplaincy training, and a lot of it is figuring out who you are, and why you tick, and why you do what you do or don’t do what you should. It’s one of the best opportunities ever—it’s like a self-counseling session. That processing was the best thing for me, because I started focusing more on my family, out of necessity. In [pastoral] ministry, I wasn’t as balanced as I hoped to be. There was always more to do. Getting on a schedule was key for me. [As a chaplain], I was a director, so I was able to direct instead of being directed by parishioners. It was the first job that I had that was structured.

Taking quality time to exercise is important. And of course, my devotional

For Brown, rebuilding in Paradise includes dog kennels with heated floors, air conditioning, and an outdoor play area. life has always been the key that centers and grounds me. My days don’t go well if I miss it. I also found a hobby too and started rebuilding classic cars. And then learning to say “no.” I’m still learning. You can’t be the savior for everyone. At the end of the day, if I give everything I have, I don’t have anything for the next day. It’s really refilling your cup.

Westwind: That’s such an important point. So many people, whether healthcare workers or parents, might feel like taking time for themselves is selfish, but it’s not.

Brown: The two professions with the highest attrition rate for burnout are clergy and health care. So every new employee orientation at our hospital, I would tell them that you just have to find ways to refill because if you give and give, you’re gonna run out for yourself.

Westwind: For those reading this who may be struggling, whether with personal trauma or the more widespread grief we’re experiencing due to the pandemic and other world events, what advice would you offer about perseverance?

Brown: What I would tell them is that you need to look for blessings every day. It’s not a year thing or a week thing or a situation thing, it’s a daily thing, where you can’t always look at the big picture. You’ve got to sometimes look at the small pieces of it that were good, because you can always find blessings. With the fire, for instance, we lost our jobs, we lost our hospital, we lost our church or school. It was devastating, absolutely devastating. But through that, people were coming afterwards saying, “But this is the blessing, that I have my kids; I have a place to sleep tonight; I have a warm meal; I have God.” It’s when you look for them that you find them.

There’s a study called “The Three Good Things” [in which participants] at the end of each day went through the process of thinking of three good things from that day. And what researchers looked at was the EQ [emotional intelligence] of the individuals to see how they thrived or if there was any difference between them and other people. They found a remarkable difference. Even for people who quit doing it, a month or a month-and-a-half later, they still found a higher level of EQ for people that have taken the time to look for the positives. That’s as simple as it gets.