MISSIONARY LOOKS FOR GOOD IN DEATH OF WIFE, CHILD

FRUITPORT, Mich. -- The missionary is home from Peru, in the church
of his parents and grandparents, to preach the good news about the
bullet that was fired by God at his wife and baby.

Standing at the pulpit in late April, he pulls out a list of evidence
pointing to God's hand at work. Actually it's only half the list.
There's no time for the whole thing, says Jim Bowers.

"You tell me if this was God or not," he says to the congregation of 1,200.

He is all tautness and understatement. Imagine a younger Joe Friday,
preaching. Just the facts, ma'am. At the front of the church, a
single white casket contains the bodies.

Jim transports the congregation back with him to the Cessna 185 float
plane, high above the green jungle and the brown river.

Gunfire is spraying the plane from behind. The pilot is screaming
into the radio, "They're killing us!" Jim's son, Cory, 6, is very
quiet as pilot Kevin Donaldson executes an emergency dive to the
river.

"Of the many bullets that penetrated the aircraft," Jim tells the
congregation, "not one of them hit Cory or me, despite the fact that
one of the first made a big hole in the windshield in front of my
head. None of them incapacitated Kevin completely."

He lists detail after detail of the miraculous landing on the water,
the miraculous rescue. It sure seems someone was watching over them.

Yet Veronica (Roni) Bowers, 35, and the couple's 7-month-old
daughter, Charity, lay dead in the back seat, killed instantly by one
round. Didn't God care about them?

"Would you say that was a stray bullet?" Jim asks.

The church is absolutely still. This is the question people have been
wrestling with. Think of possible explanations for the bullet: bad
luck, official incompetence, the Devil's marksmanship. Camus would
say it proves the absurdity of the universe.

Jim's voice gets so low that people strain forward to hear.

"That was a sovereign bullet."

There is quiet weeping. Not tears of grief, tears of joy.

Jim reports he and Cory feel "an inexplicable peace." And he asks one
more question.

"How could something so terrible be good?"

Quick Forgiveness

Jim crawled out of the Amazon and into the middle of an international
incident that U.S. and Peruvian diplomats are still sorting out. The
Cessna was mistaken for a drug courier and shot down April 20 by a
Peruvian air force jet, after an American surveillance team hired by
the CIA located the small plane. The Americans say the Peruvians
ignored warnings that the plane appeared innocent. The Peruvians say
they followed proper procedures.

For a day or two, Jim, 38, couldn't make sense of the bullet, and the
hole it ripped in his family. Then he began to understand.

Skeptics won't understand how he can so quickly say he forgives the
Peruvians. "How could I not," Jim replies, "when God has forgiven me
so much?" Roni forgives them, too, he says.

Perhaps the skeptics have never journeyed to a town like this one in
western Michigan, dominated by a yellow water tower with a smiley
face, where acres of blueberries are grown. For generations, another
significant export has been missionaries, special-delivered all
around the world.

They come from the churches that seem to be planted every few blocks.
Many are what their members call "Bible-centered" churches. The words
of the scriptures are literally true. The theory of evolution is
false. Anyone who hasn't accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior
is going to hell. If no one told them about Jesus -- tough luck. This
is why these churches believe the stakes are so high in missionary
work.

"In west Michigan, this is the Bible Belt, and we're just inundated
with this stuff," says Eric Strattan, associate pastor of Calvary
Church, the independent Baptist congregation that sent the Bowerses
to Peru. He means inundated in the best sense -- that the flood of
believers can flow to other areas that are spiritually dry.

For days, television trucks have camped outside the churches of the
missionaries and their families, in Fruitport as well as Pensacola,
Fla., near where Roni's parents live and where mother and daughter
were buried.

In life, Roni Bowers was an obscure example of the estimated 420,000
Christian missionaries worldwide. In death, her friends and pastors
believe, she may achieve her greatest accomplishment.

"God," says the Rev. Terry Fulk, missions pastor at Calvary, "is
going to capitalize on this."

A Family Mission

He asked her on a date to go roller-skating.

As a freshman at Piedmont Bible College in Winston-Salem, N.C., Roni
had resolved to date only men who shared her aspiration to become a
missionary.

Jim, the son of Calvary missionaries, had grown up on the Amazon and
wanted to return.

When Jim ran out of money for college, he joined the Army to take
advantage of the GI Bill. Roni also left school, and they married in
1985. After Jim's Army stint, they returned to Piedmont and worked,
both graduating in 1993.

After graduation, they joined Calvary. They also began to see
fertility specialists, who told them Roni couldn't have children.
They soon started the adoption process.

The Bowerses built a houseboat, with help from Calvary members,
because they intended this to be a family mission.

In fall 1994, Cory was born to a teenage mother in Michigan. Roni and
Jim soon adopted him.

They were getting ready to launch the houseboat on the Amazon in
summer 1997 when Roni felt unusually tired. She discovered she was
pregnant. God was answering her prayers again. She bought a pile of
maternity clothes.

Ten weeks later, after an agonizing labor whose pain she knew would
be for naught, she lost the baby. She felt her faith seriously shaken.

Eventually she recovered. She figured this had been the great trial
of her life.

Teaching, and Tests

The white houseboat would chug 200 miles downstream from the city of
Iquitos, Peru, and back. Jim and Roni had a huge file aboard, with
one index card for every villager they knew along that stretch of
river.

They'd pull up to a village of subsistence farmers and fishermen.
They'd play with the children, teach the adults, help to build
churches and a Bible institute. In the evenings Jim would hold
services in a large common building.

But there were also moments of doubt, tests of faith.

Two hundred miles of river, with 56 villages to keep in touch with,
and more to discover, turned out to be a huge territory. The physical
and medical needs of some of the poorest villages seemed so great.

The Rev. Dave Buckley, associate pastor of a Michigan church, shot
some videotape of his visit. Most of it includes amusing or uplifting
scenes of frontier spirituality. But at one point Jim tells the
camera of his concern about being spread so thin that they're not
accomplishing enough.

Charity was born to another Michigan teenager last September. By
December, the blond, pudgy girl was a hit among the women of the
Amazon.

Now Roni and Charity are in the white casket, and Jim sees the work of God.

"I believe God directly intervened to spare Cory and me because he
still has some sort for work for us to accomplish," says Jim. He
confesses he doesn't know if he is equipped for the work, but says
that is when God's influence is strongest.

Two days later, up in the church's sound booth, a 28-minute videotape
from the Amazon is spooling with the sound off. Roni is on-screen,
addressing the camera, in a scene shot three weeks before her death.
Roni has just been asked if there's anything church members back home
can pray for.

"From a wife and mother's point of view, my main concern is always
our health and our safety. The Lord's been very good. We've been
healthy and safe. We continue to pray for that."