We Came Within 50 Feet of Disaster
A week ago, we got to live out the truths of two cliches:
Life can change in an instant
When all is said and done, what really matters is the safety of your loved ones
On Thursday, September 5, Annette and I drove to the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles to babysit the grandkids for nine days while Andy and Liza went to New York and Maine to celebrate their tenth anniversary.
Sunday afternoon, we started hearing about the Bridge Fire, about 15 air miles south of our town of Wrightwood in the Angeles National Forest. The fire was pretty stable all day Monday and into Tuesday morning.
Mid-afternoon Tuesday, Annette drove back to Wrightwood for her Bible study meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning. Before she got there, she called a couple of times alarmed by the ominous smoke clouds over the mountains. “The sky looks like tomato soup!” she exclaimed. An hour after she got home, San Bernardino County issued a sudden “Evacuate NOW” order, so she jumped back in the car and made a beeline down the mountain.
Tuesday morning, the Bridge Fire covered only 4,000 acres, but because of what fire officials called a 1% of 1% set of weather conditions, within a few hours it had exploded to over 40,000 acres. Because we are in a canyon that backs up to one of the ridges, our neighborhood was incredibly vulnerable.
As Tuesday evening wore on, the possibility that our house could be gone by morning grew increasingly real. I began to think through what we would have to replace in the event of a total loss: all our furniture and appliances, the car we left behind, all our clothing (down to socks and underwear), our hundreds of books, Annette’s kitchen gear, my 50+ harmonicas (each of which costs about $45 and some of which are hard to get), the 150+ music charts I had spent countless hours arranging, even mouthwash and Q-Tips. But then I remembered that we were safe and so were our family and friends.
As Annette and I lay awake in bed at 4:00 a.m., I echoed what many before us have verbalized when they escaped death and injury but lost everything they owned. “At least we’re all safe.” She wholeheartedly agreed and said that, if the worst happened and our town burned down, what she would be saddest about would be the inevitable scattering of our immediate neighbors whom we have come to love. Then I said, “I’m so glad to be going through this whole thing with someone who knows how to respond the right way.”
We came so close to calamity that the back of our next-door neighbor’s fence got charred! Thankfully, by God’s grace and through the incredible work of the hundreds of firefighters, only a handful of structures in Wrightwood burned. You probably heard about our fire on national news.
Since we bought our house four years ago, we’ve suffered two years of serious drought, a severe blizzard, a few very minor earthquakes, a hurricane, close encounters with a bear and a rattlesnake, and now this (our second wildfire evacuation). We’re living a lot “closer to the land” than we did in Metro Atlanta!
A few people have asked, somewhat facetiously, if we regret moving here. Absolutely not! Even if our house had been destroyed, I would say the same.
The punchline of a talk called “Demystifying Decision-Making” which I have given several times is that if you deliberately, responsibly and prayerfully seek God’s will for important decisions, you must interpret everything that results from that decision as part of his plan. And that includes even such tragedies as your house going up in flames. God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving That means none of the unfortunate aftermath of a decision is beyond his control or has caught him by surprise.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you won’t experience frustration, disappointment, or even anger over the circumstance, but ultimately, you have to settle in to the fact that God filters everything through his omnipotent and loving hands.
Next time, I’ll relay some of the great things that have already happened because of this forest fire experienc
+++++++++++++++
Keep your life free from love of money; be content with what you have. He himself has said, after all, “I will never, ever leave or forsake you.” – Hebrews 13:5 (The New Testament for Everyone)
What is the hardest set of circumstances you have ever faced? To what extent were you able to see God’s hand in the situation?
How do you think you would react if you lost all your possessions?