Right Place, Right Time

I don’t know about you, but have you ever dodged a bullet? Literally, I did. 12 years ago,  I was speaking at a camp called The Pines in Grand Forks here in BC. It was a beautiful week of weather, phenomenal fun with the kids. It was an awesome week, but then a storm came through.

 I watched the clouds, and on Instagram, I posted in this gray formation and said, “uh-oh”. And sure enough, it was a storm. It was a 100-year storm. And literally within 10, 12 minutes, a total of a 330 of those pine trees either uprooted or snapped. And, tragically, a little boy, fatally died during that storm.

 The bullet for me was the tree next to my cabin, the speaker’s cabin, It literally cut it in half. And any other day apart from that day, around 5 o’clock, I was in my cabin finishing my talk for that night. That day, I wasn’t. It was so bizarre.

 I was a little bit late coming out of town. There was no cell signal at this camp, and I’d pulled over to check my last voice messages, sent my last text before I went into the dead zone of cell towards the camp. And it was during that time that the storm happened. Any other day of the week, I’d have been in that cabin. I don’t know what I would have done, but I know that that huge Douglas fir cut right down the middle of my cabin.

 What was interesting, one of the reasons I was at the camp was to set up their marketing strategy. The executive director was not a fan of social media, especially with kids, and I got that. But it was 2012. It was a cusp of everything going digital.

 And part of the reason I was there was to help them create their own digital strategy. So on the Wednesday, they didn’t have any social media. I created the 1st Facebook page, and I think on the day of the storm, there was 2 likes, which was like me and the camp director.

 And now, post storm, we realized that we had 120 or so kids that we needed to get the message out.

 Power lines were down. Phone lines were down. 1 of the team was from the US, and he had an AT & T signal on his cell phone that I was able to hotspot out of and use the Facebook page to communicate to the world that there had been this tragic storm. Not that we knew there was a fatality at that time because they’ve been taken to hospital, but that was the way we communicated. And by the end of that weekend, I think we had something like 500 or so people on that page. That Facebook page became the strategy for fundraising to rebuild the camp, which we did.

 I came away thinking as I drove home the next day, It’s like an 8 hour drive home. And I came away thinking about so many things, obviously, not being in the cabin. The fact that I’d set up that social media strategy, the fact that that campaign was so important for communication.

 I was meant to be there, and there are many other reasons why I was meant to be there. Maybe I’ll talk about those in another video. But that came back to me again and again in 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, even today, 2024, 12 years later, that I have a gift of communication and teaching and strategy, and my time was not that day. My time is still not that day, and long may it never be that day. But now I know, and I as I knew then, as I know now, that I have a gift for sharing to the world that I can’t hide behind.

 So sometimes stuff happens.

 What happens to you can affect the whole course of your future. It certainly affected mine, and I’m still doing it. And I love it.