Newly named president-elect Dr. Calvin Troup ’83 spoke during Chapel in February. He shared his powerful testimony, “Learning Christ’s Faithfulness in a Hard Way” with Geneva students, faculty and staff. Dr. Troup’s message of sustaining faith in times of physical and spiritual pain and reconciling trust with the grief of losing loved ones much too soon was based on his personal experience.

Dr. Troup’s story began with him waking up confused in a dark room. Searching his memory, the last thing Dr. Troup could recall was travelling on a highway. He realized then that he was in a hospital. And Dr. Troup thought, “I’m not doing so well.”

As he lay there in pain, Dr. Troup began to sort out the situation and realized that he must have been in a terrible car accident. “The Lord was a real comfort to me in that moment,” he remembers. “I thought, ‘I could die. And I’m OK with that. Christ died for me. Christ suffered for me. Christ can take care of me. I’m OK.’”

This happened in 1983, just weeks after commencement. Dr. Troup was engaged to be married that August, and the wedding of his best friend Ed Hartman ’83 was scheduled for May 28. So following Hartman’s rehearsal dinner on the evening before the ceremony, he, Dr. Troup and four other close friends were riding in a car, enjoying the camaraderie and the promise of the next stage of their lives.

From the other direction drove a car with an arguing couple who had been drinking. The woman in the passenger seat wanted a divorce. But the man, whose blood alcohol was later found to be three times the legal limit, said, “You don’t have to worry about a divorce. I’m going to kill both of us.” Then he swerved into opposing traffic, colliding head on with the car full of friends. The impact that critically injured Dr. Troup killed two of the passengers—Hartman and Keith Myers ‘83—both of whom had been Dr. Troup’s roommates.

Andrew Bernard ’83—Troup’s other Geneva roommate—was also a passenger in the car and was hospitalized with serious injuries. Troup wouldn’t believe Andrew was alive until he could hear his friend’s voice on the other end of a phone line, from his own hospital room. They talked about how many visitors shared Romans 8:28 in the hospital that he recalled thinking, “I believe Romans 8:28 to my core—all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose. But this wasn’t good.”

However, Dr. Troup knew even then that God would bring good out of the accident. And he talked to the Chapel audience about some of those positive things. “I started to better understand who Christ is,” he said. “Jesus Christ has scars, experienced loss as a human being and was made incarnate for us. And He did not exempt Himself from suffering. God is never far away from us when we are suffering.”

Through suffering, Dr. Troup came to a profound understanding of salvation. “Our lives are a mess. We have issues. We have problems. Only Christ can resolve those things for us. Only Christ can lift us up when something happens in our lives that we can’t understand and we can’t answer. Christ goes with us and will raise us by the power of His indestructible life. He intercedes for us and will pray for us forever. What that means is that Christ didn’t get over the crucifixion. And we don’t get over things like losing our best friend who dies right next to us.”

Dr. Troup’s testimony concluded with an illustration that he says greatly helped him come to terms with his experience. On a family vacation when he was a child, Dr. Troup saw a tree that had a cannonball embedded in it on the day of the Gettysburg battle. At the time of impact, the projectile was almost the same width as the tree. It almost killed it. But when Dr. Troup encountered it a century later, the tree had grown around the shell.

This is similar to what happens to us when we trust the Lord to see us through our ordeals, says Dr. Troup. “When these traumas come into our lives, it’s like getting hit by a cannonball and you almost die,” he says. “By God’s grace, that cannonball becomes part of our life and we live with it and it changes us forever. God changes us and makes us grow so that we’re able to bear the burden so much better. Our prayer is that God will grow our hearts so that when we lean on Him, He’ll uphold us and strengthen us as we Trust in Him.”