Special to The B.C. Catholic

Sometimes God closes one door only to open another. As a single teacher I decided last fall I wanted to spend this summer doing missionary work. I originally made plans to do missionary work in Guatemala. After having lined everything up to go to Guatemala my mission was called off due to escalating violence in the region. Shortly after a friend suggested I consider serving up north.

When I said I was open to serving wherever I was needed, my friend said he would pass on my contact information to Bishop Hector Vila of the Whitehorse Diocese. A week later I received a phone call from Bishop Vila. God opened the door to a mission I had not been originally considering.

As I prepared for this mission I sometimes felt like I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The weekend after school got out I drove 1,800 km from Coquitlam to Dease Lake, B.C. Dease Lake is a small village of approximately 400 people on the Stewart Cassiar Highway about 200 km south of the B.C./Yukon border. The last town with a full-sized grocery store I passed through on my way up to Dease Lake was Smithers, still 650 km away from Dease Lake. (Although Dease Lake is in B.C. it belongs to the Yukon Diocese of Whitehorse.

When Bishop Vila first suggested he would like me to go to Dease Lake, I again saw God’s hand in this because, unknown to Bishop Vila, when I was a young child my family would spend a couple of months a year in Dease Lake where my dad would work as a family physician. As a result, I knew exactly where I was going. It was the same mission church where my family had attended Communion services when I was a child.

Whitehorse Bishop Hector Vila at St. Theresa’s mission church in Telegraph Creek, B.C., in July. The church was destroyed by wildfires in August. 

The day I arrived in Dease Lake, a missionary serving in Telegraph Creek gave me a list of people he suggested I contact. I steadily worked through the list making connections in Dease Lake and the “nearby” (nearby is a very relative term in the North!) communities of Iskut and Good Hope. Each of these communities are more than 100 kilometres apart from one another.

Some days I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, but the Holy Spirit led me and kept reminding me he was in control.

The first time I visited the village of Good Hope I was looking for a teenager who had expressed interest in being baptized. When I couldn’t find her, I stopped to ask someone for help locating her. The woman I spoke with on the side of the road just happened to be her aunt, and when I explained why I was looking for her she said, “Great! I want my kids to be baptized too!’’ Those are the kinds of encounters that can only be orchestrated by the Holy Spirit!

While in Dease Lake I also led Communion services on Sundays when Mass was not celebrated. Because of the remote location of Dease Lake and a shortage of priests in the Whitehorse Diocese, Mass is only offered every four to six weeks. I am used to attending daily Mass when possible, and so to be in a place where even Sunday Mass was not always available was difficult, but it certainly inspired me to pray on a daily basis for an increase in vocations to the priesthood. It also gave me a greater appreciation for the Mass when we were able to celebrate it.

I even had an unexpected blessing one weekend when a priest from Switzerland who just happened to be travelling through knocked on the door one Saturday evening and asked if he would be able to celebrate Mass in the chapel the next morning before continuing on his way.

In early August, my summer mission took an unexpected turn. On Saturday, Aug. 4, an evacuation order was issued for the village of Telegraph Creek, and the entire community was evacuated to Dease Lake. As I prayed for all those impacted by this evacuation I jumped in to help prepare meals for the evacuees.

At 1:30 in the morning on Sunday, Aug. 5, I could hear dozens of trucks driving by on the road outside the mission and I knew that something terrible was going on.

When I arrived at 6 a.m. to help prepare breakfast for the evacuees I learned that the firefighters and emergency crews had been evacuated during the night because the forest fire was burning in the village.

The next 72 hours were long and difficult for many people as we waited for news about damage the fire had caused. Even before the full extent of the devastation was known I was deeply touched by the faith I saw in the people I encountered during those difficult days. Even in such tragedy members of the community were praying that the Holy Spirit would come down upon their community and light hearts on fire with God’s love.

They commented that God must have a purpose for allowing this fire to take place. They recognized this tragedy as an opportunity for a new beginning in their community and the potential it had to draw the people together. They recognized the gift of one another as they gave thanks that no lives were lost. The faith of these people as they lived through the devastation of losing more than half the buildings in their community, including homes and St. Theresa’s mission church and rectory, deeply touched my heart.

The second half of my mission was something I could never have anticipated but I also knew that even this was in God’s plan when he sent me up north. He already knew what he would ask of me.

Please continue to keep the people of Telegraph Creek in your prayers as they are still under an evacuation order and their Tahltan nation chief has said it is unlikely that they will be able to return home until the end of October. Even then, approximately half the homes have been burned to the ground and are unlikely to be rebuilt before next summer

If you are interested in doing lay missionary work in Northern B.C. or the Yukon, please get in touch with Bishop Hector Vila at the Whitehorse Diocese web page or by phone 867-667-2052 or email [email protected].