Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Ropin’ hope
Family channels grief into new ministry
Smith Arena sits just off a country bend outside of Rose Bud, a simple patch of dirt surrounded by fence panels with chutes on one end. To the uninitiated, it doesn’t look like much — and certainly not the founding point for a ministry.
Danielle Smith sees it differently. She and her husband created Brander’d by Christ here last fall, at first thinking they would cover the arena and turn it into a Bible camp ministry. But it was her next inspiration that struck a louder chord.
“We’re supposed to make Bibles,” she says, simply.
The arena that inspired the ministry is ground Smith knows like the back of her hand. She grew up in a house just across the road from where her father built the arena, owned it for years, then turned it over to her and her husband, Bo Smith. It’s the kind of place where locals gather to hone their skills, mingle with neighbors, brag a little, laugh a lot, dream big.
It was a place her son, Brander Smith, loved more than just about anywhere in the world.
“Brander, you put him on a horse and that kid was like, glued to a saddle, literally at age 3,” Danielle says recently from a picnic table outside the arena fence, her eyes scanning the dirt. “He won a roping contest with a pacifier in his mouth. He’d be sucking a pacifier, swinging a rope and catch it every time. He was a natural.”
Danielle and Bo may hold the title to this place, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind who this spot really belongs to. Brander died here last summer while practicing on the eve of a national roping competition. His parents were just steps away when the 14-year-old’s horse reared up, crushing him against the wall of the pen.
“I literally went from there to there, and I knew it was done,” Danielle says, pointing. “Brander and I prayed together all the time. So I got down there and I said, ‘Brander, I’m right here. I won’t be leaving your side. You want me to pray?’ and he squeezed my hand. So, I started praying. But I knew.”
“I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t hysterical. Me and Brander were talking to God together. It was the most amazing thing ever because I was not a basket case. I didn’t say, ‘Oh God, no, no! Not my baby!’ I didn’t do any of that. When I got down there, the sense of peace was all over me. I could feel the angels. I could feel it all and I said, ‘God, if you need him, then you need him more than me.’”
The next day, Danielle and Bo sat on that same picnic table, trying to make sense of what had happened. Brander’s boots still lay in the arena, and pain hung in the air.
“Bo said, ‘What are we going to do now? Do you think we’ll ever rope again?’ I said, ‘No. I’m done,’” Danielle says. “I’m like, let’s sell it all. Let’s go to Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, I don’t care.”
Just a few hours later, as the couple was making Brander’s funeral arrangements, Danielle got a text message from a friend.
“She said, ‘I know how much that arena means to you. I need you to listen to what I have to say. I do not want you to walk away. That is now holy ground. I want you to know, the angels came and they blessed that ground,’” Danielle says. “Ever since then, I’ve had a totally different outlook of it.”
A few weeks later, the Smiths founded Brander’d by Christ, a rodeo ministry to echo their fallen son’s deep faith.
“I’d say probably two months after the accident I just woke up and for some reason God said, ‘Brander’d by Christ’” Danielle says. “And I was like OK, what am I supposed to do with that? Like, I don’t know what ‘Brander’d by Christ’ means.”
The family knew of a cowboy Bible released in honor of Lane Frost, a world champion bull rider killed during a competition in 1989, and they quickly envisioned creating something similar. So they went to the source.
“We have some friends that are friends with Lane Frost’s mom, and we reached out to them and got the information of who made their Bibles,” Danielle says. “We had Brander’s Bibles made, and we’ve got 2,000 of them. I just want to give Bibles away to all these kids.”
In addition to distributing the Bibles at church camps and rodeos, the Smiths also planned the first Brander’d by Christ roping event in March to both hand out more Bibles and raise funds for the next printing. Due to weather, the inaugural event was postponed until later in the year.
Ron Riddle, pastor of Crossroads Cowboy Church in El Paso where the family attends services, says the ministry perfectly captures who Brander was and how he wore his faith.
“[Brander] was kind of a quiet kid. He loved the Lord, and he was just the kindest, most polite young man that you would ever come across. Just helpful to everybody that was around him,” Riddle says.
“And he genuinely had a good heart; he cared about people and wanted other people to know the Lord. When he started coming to Cowboy Church, I think that’s what drew his mom and dad here, because he just absolutely loved this church.”
“[The Smiths are] trying to turn their grief into something positive, as an opportunity to memorialize Brander. They’re trying to use his life to minister to other people and encourage them to be strong Christians like he was.”
Danielle says she wants the ministry to lead others to Christ, especially those who are lost or in pain. She says while Brander was a kid of relatively few words, he had keen instincts for reaching such people, something she was reminded of when reviewing his social media after his death.
“There’s this one girl in particular [who was] reaching out to him; she’s a troubled teen and he’s telling her much he loves her and how much everybody else loves her too, and to not give up because God loves her,” Danielle says, her voice breaking. “It was just so sweet; I thought wow, you were just 14 and telling a broken teenage girl that. That’s pretty cool.”
The young ministry is also proving therapy for the Smith family itself, which includes Lariette, 18, and a baby boy the family is in the process of adopting. Recovery is a complex process, and not always what you expect, says Danielle, who’s begun relaying what she’s learned in talks to women’s groups and other audiences.
“I think people look at me like I’m crazy because when they see me, I choose to smile. I choose to find the joy,” she says. “That day, when I was praying over Brander, my prayer was not your normal prayer. I prayed, ‘God, he’s your child, he’s not mine. You only let me borrow him for a short time, and you couldn’t have given me a better child than you gave me.’
“I’m thankful Brander died doing exactly what he loved. How many people get to leave this crappy earth doing what they loved? Not very many. That to me is a huge testimony in itself that my baby died with a rope in his hand. I’m not mad, I’m not bitter. I’m so thankful for that. So now, when I’m upset or anything, I will come out here and sit exactly where he was. There’s days where you’re like ahhh, he’s here. He’s hugging me. He’s here.”