Nick and Kelly Buskirk

Laguna Niguel, California —We received the phone call the day after Christmas about 5:00 in the evening. It was one of my wife’s best friends, Kathy Buskirk. Her tone that evening was full of alarm—-she asked for urgent prayer.

Her son Nick, 26, and his wife were in Thailand at Phi Phi Island, a short distance from Phuket. After getting married on the beach in Santa Barbara, they decided to live overseas for awhile before settling down. He was teaching scuba diving on Phi Phi and his wife Kelly was teaching yoga on the beach every morning at one of the beachfront hotels.

From the moment Kathy and her husband David learned of the disaster there were hours of waiting and wondering if and when the phone would ring. It was a 15-hour period that seriously tested a mother’s faith.

She says that during that time her heart would begin to race and she would go upstairs in their house, read scripture aloud, and claim God’s strength and His promises. Every 15 minutes she and her husband and younger son had to hold each other as they waited and the clocked ticked and there was no word.

“All I had those 15 hours was my faith in God and His Word,” Kathy says. “I prayed that His will would be done, but I also prayed that His will would be for them to live. I hoped their time wasn’t up. I just completely relied on Him.”

The worst part was when it came time to go to bed that night and they still hadn’t heard anything. “I was exhausted from the day but I couldn’t really sleep,” she says. Lying in the darkness she felt her faith was being stretched to the limit.
“I told God if I woke up in the morning and we still hadn’t heard anything it would have to be His strength to get me through.” But when would the phone ring?

At 11:15 that night there was a ring and Kathy and her husband David lunged for separate phones. It was Nick—he and Kelly were miraculously spared! Kelly was unexpectedly given the morning off on the day of the disaster, or she would have been on the beach teaching yoga when the tsunami hit. Instead of their normal routine, they decided to take a longtail boat out of the harbor on a recreational dive.

“When they set foot in the boat, the water was starting to recede from the harbor,” Kathy reports. Amazingly, they were just beyond the outer perimeter of the bay when the wave hit. “Kelly said that if they looked back they could have seen it.” They missed the disaster and certain death by 5 to 10 minutes.

They spent several hours diving with two other friends, and noticed some unusual wave activity, but nothing particularly distressing. As they began to make their way back to the harbor they saw something unusual-- food, tables, and other furniture floating in the water. They thought a large boat capsized.

As they got close to the shore, they heard people yelling and saw much more debris. “Then they saw the devastation and people begging for help,” Kathy says. “People were screaming at them to run.” Nick and Kelly ran into the hills, taking refuge with a large number of people now traumatized by the morning’s events.

After about an hour, they came back down to their once idyllic haven, now a complete shambles. “They saw people dying right and left,” Kathy says. They used doors as makeshift stretchers to move those who were injured.

Many were evacuated to hospitals in Bangkok, and Nick and Kelly made the difficult decision to leave, joining friends who needed medical attention in the Thai capital. After a couple weeks in Bangkok, they returned to the U.S. for a joyous homecoming with family and friends.

Amidst the joy, Kathy struggles with lingering questions about God’s sovereignty. Her son and daughter-in-law have experienced some of the guilt faced by many survivors. “This is harder in some ways than 9-1-1, because then there was someone to blame,” Kathy says.

“It’s not that I don’t trust His sovereignty, but I’m begging Him to let me know why,” Kathy says. “My pastor talked about trusting God in the midst of doubt and despair,” she says. “I think God just allowed this.”

In 15 hours of waiting a mother’s heart was tested. Kathy reached into the deepest part of her soul and clung to the sturdiest pillar, the strongest anchor she could hold on to--faith and trust in the promises of God. “I can choose to trust Him in the middle of my circumstances,” she says. “God will use this in time.”