It’s a strange thing to watch fires literally consume what you love-- an even stranger thing to be aware of your utter inability to do anything about it.
The small mountain town of Woodland Park that we call home in Colorado is surrounded by wildfires right now. For the past several days, we’ve watched our friends post Facebook pictures and status updates of their evacuations, of smoke filling the air and flames consuming natural vistas. The Waldo Canyon Fire in West Colorado Springs has forced 32,000 people to flee their homes to date, suddenly causing the wedding pictures they haven’t looked at in years to pull rank in value over the flat panel they just spent a fortune on and watch everyday.
We’ve read the reports on the news from half-a-globe away, and we’ve wondered what it would be like to be back home right now– the lines of carts loaded with water and bread at Walmart, the conversations with strangers at the Donut Mill, the mushroom cloud that must be surreal, hovering over the mountains, like some giant white hungry monster. One friend on Facebook simply posted this as her status yesterday:
I just want to cry.
And I agree. Because it’s a helpless, humbling thing to watch something so unpredictably destructive char the view from Rampart Range and the historic Flying W Ranch and the evergreens surrounding the iconic Garden of the Gods– not to mention the homes of people just neighborhoods away.
And we have a room in a basement and a storage unit in a backyard there in Woodland that are crammed to the tip-top with the things that matter most, but that didn’t fit in suitcases two years ago– the photo album from our first year living overseas on the island of Saipan, the art we got from that trip to Spain, the little white dress Kelty wore in my sister’s wedding, the mix-tapes I made for Matt in high school {yes, I did keep those}. And besides the real estate itself, it’s the threat to those treasures in the storage rooms that causes my heart to start beating faster.
Our friend and sculptor, Scott Stearman wrote this on Sunday evening:
There’s probably 5-8 miles as the crow flies between our house and the fire. The sky is eerie as smoke obscures the sun and the surrounding mountains. Outside it smells like a campfire, only we can’t get on the upwind side of the smoke.
It’s odd when you realize what is really important and valuable to you when you are making decisions about what to take and what to leave behind. I realized that the stuff I value the most is the same stuff I have shoved to the back of our closets and hidden in dusty boxes on the top shelf of the garage… pictures, family videos, the honeymoon stuff we never put into an album, old VHS tapes of my mom and dad. The material “stuff” that represents that we worked hard, holds no value at all. Our home, the “toys” we have, furniture, cars…. not worth much when I look at them next to these crumpled old boxes of keepsakes.
Whether the fire gets here or not, the lesson is learned. I know what matters most. My family… my friends… I’ll hold them a little more tightly from now on.
And as I read my precious friends post messages deciding which things deserve space in car trunks, and as I watch the flames get closer on the Facebook photos, I am reminded deeply down to my soul
That I am not in control,
That frontline battles can, and do, rage in all places on the globe, and
That trusting in a God who promises to bring “beauty from ashes” might sometimes be very, very literal.
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Please pray for my friends and neighbors in Colorado Springs and all the areas up the mountain a bit to Woodland Park, the town of our heart-community and our sending church. Please especially pray for the firefighters from all over the U.S., too, who are proving truly heroic during these long days, and for those who have lost their homes already.
*photos are snagged from Facebook, thanks for posting Jessica and Kevin.
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