This Godzilla-like, evil, fire
monster raged towards our house on the loose looking for anything to devour.
Unfortunately, it was much faster than Godzilla and it could be in more than one place at
one time. It breathed the dry
I started thinking
we should invent some huge 50-mile asbestos barricade to stop the fire. Or maybe we could
invent a huge 20-mile fan that we could turn on and blow the fire away from people and
their homes and back to the desert. As I prayed, I realized that only God and/or nature
could stop this monster with the rare conditions we were experiencing in
Our huge umbrella
secured inside our outdoor lawn table actually blew out. I heard Kristen yell and as I
came outside I saw her doing her Mary Poppins impersonation as
she grabbed the umbrella trying to keep it from flying away. She told me how un-hip I was,
quickly correcting me (for the sake of the teens reading this) and saying she was
impersonating Rihanna under her umbrella,
ella, ella.
It crossed my mind
that all of
I
know what you were thinking . . .
I just remembered
that I surveyed a few hundred High School students at a football stadium rally I was speaking at a
couple years ago just after one of the hurricanes hit them in
As I write, we are
currently in the 5th day of the fires. As of Day 3 the Witch Creek fire, the
one closest to us, was only 1% contained. That means there is a constant, ongoing feeling
of uneasiness and uncertainty, not knowing if and when you will literally have to flee for
your life. Kristen mentioned being SO tired but not being able to sleep because her body
was so pumped with adrenaline. I would restlessly sleep a couple of hours and then wake up
wondering if we needed to evacuate in the next hour or if our power had gone out (which
would be bad because then I would have no light to be able to find the remote to hit the
button to turn on the TV!). So I would turn on the TV in the middle of the night to see if
our house had burned up yet (they actually had listings of the addresses of the houses
that had been destroyed).
We did have one
power outage right when I hit a link on my computer. I seriously thought I had opened one
powerful virus when the entire computer went black. Then when I saw the TV was also off, I
knew I had hit the mother of all viruses which had taken
control of our entire house! Finally, being the college grad that I am, I was relieved to
realize that it was only a power outage.
Another
inconvenience during this showdown with the fire was the
Of course during
prime time TV watching hours, we were not able to watch any shows like “Heroes” on Monday night
because almost every channel was inundated with fire news and pictures of firefighters
fighting the fire and . . . wait a minute, we did get to see Heroes, only it
was the real live kind that were actually risking their lives to save others. They were a
living example of Jesus who said, “There is no greater love than to lay down
one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13 NLT). And of course, Jesus
demonstrated that love by voluntarily laying down His life for you and me so we could
choose life . . . both now and forever.
Fortunately, not
many people have lost their lives so far, but it sure made us think about the brevity of
life and especially stuff we own. As we packed our vehicles for a potential hasty
departure, it was very thought-provoking and even sad to think about what we would take
and what could be lost forever. It didn’t really bother me too much about losing our
house. I saw interviews of people very distraught as their homes and possessions were
destroyed (some 2,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed). One lady mentioned all the
hours and heart and soul she had invested in their home. I was reminded of Matt. 6:19-21
that tells us not to store up treasures on Earth. The truth is that we are all going to
lose ALL of our possessions sooner or later. If we put our heart, energy and money into
investments of earthly stuff we are going to be disappointed. The market will crash, some
one will rip us off or a fire may burn everything to ashes (or if it is something I
own, it will probably break!). As the chorus of my song “Soap for Lunch” says, “One
life to live, will soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last.”
That’s why Jesus said we should invest our time
and money storing up treasures in Heaven where they will never be destroyed.
I was also reminded
that Jesus said the foxes have their holes and the birds their nests but the Son of Man
has no place to lay His head (Mat. 8:20). Jesus was a homeless man! One of the last songs
my friend Rich
Mullins wrote on the Jesus
Record was about the thought-provoking idea that “the hope of the
whole world rests on the shoulders of a homeless man.” I can’t
believe that in this fall edition of the Perihelion exactly 10 years ago I was
writing about Rich going into the presence of that Awesome God he wrote and sang about
(see Larrybubb.com Perihelion newsletter archives). What impressed me most about
Rich was not his incredible songwriting and music. Rich could have lived in a mansion but
instead chose to live in a humble trailer on a Navajo reservation touching lives of those
less fortunate. Rich decided not to take a cent of all the potential millions from the royalties
from his songs. Instead, it all went to organizations like Compassion International, to
keep kids from starving –both physically
and spiritually. After he passed away, all of his earthly belongings did not even fill up
a small U-haul. On his “Winds of Heaven…Stuff of Earth” album he
wrote, “The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all
good things.”
As we walked out the
door that Sunday, ashes like snow flurries were falling
from a gloomy sky.
We had trouble breathing as it seemed like we were at a huge campfire, minus the
marshmallows. We assumed there was a fire a mile or 2 away in the
Right here I wanted
to put a picture of the moon I took with our camera to show how it looked in our sky.
However, since the newsletter is not in color, it would look like a blue moon . . . but then
this was the kind of thing you only see once in a blue moon! If you go to my website (Larrybubb.com) to this article,
you will see the picture I took, assuming our modern technology does not fail us!
The fires have made
me very thankful. In the midst of this exhausting, trying, threatening time I am thankful
that we did not have to evacuate, and of course that we did not lose our home. I am also
extremely thankful to remember that even if our home and all our stuff had burned up, we
would still be better off than many of the people around the world are tonight. I am very
humbled to live in
We were also
thankful to be able to house some evacuees or as I liked to call them, hostages. But after a couple
days they escaped, er, I mean were allowed to return to their house. I am also thankful
for the love and compassion God has put into true believers all over the world. I got an
email from a lady
in
As
I am writing this, a song from Michael W.
Smith’s
album “Healing Rain” just began to play. The very first words are: “All
I have in this world is fire from above. All I have in this world is You . . . all I want
is You.”
Lots of questions come to us during catastrophic, trying times. I don’t know all the answers but I do know we need to keep our eyes on Jesus. In a very loose paraphrase of His words from Matthew 5, “Fire falls on the just and the unjust.”