The Harrowing Story of Surviving a Tsunami!
CHRISTMAS IN THAILAND
In 2004, when Riley was ten she and her family went to Thailand to visit her grandfather for Christmas. They met up with their extended family and all twelve of them enjoyed celebrating Christmas together. The next morning (December 26, 2004), Riley woke up to sudden shaking. She thought maybe her sister was trying to play a joke on her, but her sister was not in the room. Riley ran to her parent’s room, and they calmly told her the rumbling was an earthquake, but they would be fine. A short time later, Riley and her sister headed to the beach to build sandcastles with their dad while her mom stayed behind in the resort lobby to make a phone call. After the girls played for a while, their dad decided it was time for them to return to their room. As they began walking back to their room, Riley noticed something odd. She didn’t hear animal sounds any longer which was unusual because there were a ton of monkeys in the area. Then, they started to hear people scream. “I looked over my shoulder toward the beach – and where the water had just been there was now only sand.
All the water around the beach had left…I watched while people started to run in all directions; nobody seemed to know what was going on. I saw a thin white line in the distance and, somehow, the white line was growing bigger and bigger by the second,” shares Riley. The white line was a giant tsunami coming directly at the resort.
Her mom was in the lobby and saw the water receding, she knew exactly what was happening. She ran to the beach where she thought her children were building sandcastles. There were hundreds of people on the beach panicking and running all around her. In the middle of the chaos she asked the Lord, “Where are they?” She heard one word: flee. As Riley’s mom began to sprint back to the room, she ran into her family on the beach. The five of them began running to the other side of the resort. Her dad carried her seven-year-old sister Sierra, and her mom carried her five-year-old sister Bronte. Riley, who was ten, ran between her parents. As they tried to escape, she could hear wood being crushed from crumpled buildings and screams from those who had not acted quickly enough.
The day before the tsunami hit, Riley and her mom had discovered a goat path which led to one of the cliffs on the southern side of the peninsula by the sea. They found the path and began climbing to higher ground grabbing tree limbs and pulling themselves up. Riley kept shouting, “God, help us! Lord, rescue us. We need You!” They climbed up the path and prayed they would be high enough above the spot where the wave crested. Riley was exhausted and began to fall behind. For a moment she looked back down to the beach, but wished she had not, “Our altitude afforded a grand view of the resort, and what I saw was like a scene from the apocalypse. The wave was annihilating everything in its way – people, animals, buildings, and boats.” Then she heard her dad say, “Riley! Run!” She focused on her father’s voice and caught up with her parents. When they reached the top of the cliff, they were 100 feet from ground level. Riley fell to her knees and thanked God for saving them and asked Him for peace. Instantly, she felt what seemed like a blanket being wrapped around her, it was His presence. Riley was thankful to be alive, but she was also left wondering why she had survived such a traumatic event that had killed over 230,000 people.
AFTERMATH
The weeks and months following the tsunami, Riley struggled with PTSD. She would sometimes have nightmares and needed help adjusting to reality after her near-death experience. Her greatest fear after her near-death experience was the ocean because she had seen it kill countless people. To help her get over her fear, her parents enrolled her and her sisters in a beach lifeguarding program in New Zealand for kids of all ages that summer. Riley was terrified to do the course, but her father told her, “Riley, either courage or fear will exist in your life, and you get to choose which one wins. All you need is a little more courage.”
Riley also received therapy to help process her trauma and she learned how to allow herself to feel emotions like sadness, anger, and disappointment.
SMALL ACTS OF BRAVERY
Riley was born with a hearing impairment that her parents didn’t even realize until she was six years old. Kids in school would make fun of her because she couldn’t hear or speak well. To improve her hearing, tiny tubes were put into her eardrum, but hearing still proved to be difficult. She learned to read lips and went through speech therapy. In high school the bullying continued. She was often called names and made fun of for her Christian beliefs. She began writing letters to her future self to help overcome whatever fear she was facing. Over time, she grew stronger and more confident.
“We are most often not in control of the hardships that hit our lives, but we are responsible for the way we respond. We can choose to cower in fear or freeze in indecision. Or we can choose to rise up: fear is a feeling, but courage is a choice,” shares Riley. Every day she exercises three seconds of wild courage by saying 3-2-1 when faced with a challenging situation. This formula allows her to engage in whatever the situation might be even when fear is present. Below are some of the situations in which Riley has used wild courage:
• One day, she was walking on the beach when she heard someone screaming for help. As she scanned the horizon, she saw a man who had been swept out by a riptide frantically waving his arms. As she began to run towards him, she felt fear rise in her. Then she applied her wild courage technique and ran into the water to save him despite her fear. By the time she swam to the man he had drowned. She began CPR in the water and continued until she felt a pulse. By helping this man, Riley truly beat her fear of the ocean.
• After earning her undergraduate degree in New Zealand, Riley began to grow restless. Although she had a great job working for a charity and helping people Riley decided she wanted to attend Fuller Seminary for their Global Leadership program to get her master’s degree. At twenty-one, Riley applied, but received a rejection letter. The prerequisite for admittance into the program was five years of full-time leadership experience in ministry. Instead of giving up her dream, Riley responded to their rejection email with the reasons why she should be in the program and then she prayed. She felt God tell her to go to the school, so she used wild courage and quit her job, packed her bags, and decided to move to America. After one week living in America, she received an acceptance letter from Fuller Seminary.
• One night after work, Riley was driving home when she saw a sixteen-year-old boy named Mason sitting in the middle of a bridge with his feet dangling over a sixty-foot drop. She counted 3,2,1 then climbed over the bridge railings to sit beside the kid. She listened to the pain Mason was experiencing in his own life and found an opportunity to offer him hope. Then, Riley and he moved off the bridge and she shared with him how much God loves him. That night, he asked Jesus in his heart. Riley shares, “Loving people well takes courage…but we cannot be courageous and not sacrifice. Loving others always costs something – your time, your energy, your pride, your privacy, your heart.”
Riley is compassionate for people experiencing fear because she knows what that feels like. She feels called to help others who are going through their own tsunamis. Riley is a speaker and podcaster who seeks to convey a profound truth: “With God, you can beat fear.”
To order Riley's book Three Seconds of Courage click the LINK!
CREDITS
Author, Three Seconds of Courage, (Baker Publishing, 2025); Speaker featured on a TEDx Talk, interviewed by William Shatner for The History Channel; Cohost of Called for More podcast; Received her Commercial Law and Management degree from Auckland University (New Zealand) and her Master’s degree in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary; Surfer, Equestrian rider, Beach lifeguard and Mixed martial artist; Married to Jack; Child: Esther
