that shadow on the right is cast by the eave of our roof.
Wow. We had a trippy Tuesday. I left Buffalo NY and Kingdom Bound in the morning. And at ‘wheels down’ in LAX my phone lit up with texts and voicemail. Don’t panic. Everyone is fine but there was/is a brushfire burning through our property… It’s a weird thing getting bad news and being separated by time and space. It normally takes me a solid 2 and a half hours to get home from touch down. I did my best to drive within the speed limit and listen well to Jude as she talked me through the details.
By the time I got home everyone was gone. My family, the neighbors and the 5 fire crews. There was just a swathe of burnt ground running through our garden. Our house is on a hill. I walked the perimeter marveling at how close the fire came to burning down our stuff. I took a few pictures. Then I jumped in my car and went to thank the Fire Chief. I asked him for any tips to get us through the night. It was still blowing hard and the temperature was high in the 80′s with no sign of dropping. He gave me his number and told me to call if i saw any smoke at all. I drove back home and went and looked at some of the hot patches he’d warned me about. The wind was howling. There was no one home. I suddenly saw smoke blowing from sage brush. Then I was running down hill with a bucket of water to the burning. I went for my iphone but in the soot and sweat i managed to delete the FD’s number! (there really should be an apple z on iphones!). I actually started laughing. The hill was on the verge of going again (and our house with it) and i couldn’t get hold of anyone. I fired off a quick tweet (twitter saves lives!) and got back to work. Eventually the FD’s number popped back in my head and i got the call off. A neighbor arrived to help, and eventually the FD, and within 30 minutes everything was back under control.
The verse i read that morning was Psalm 50. ‘Call on me in the day of trouble and I will answer you’. Like the blind man in John 9 I don’t really know what else to tell you. ‘I was blind but now I see’. We were in trouble and then we weren’t. My father in law was the first one to see the smoke. He’s a farmer from Africa and very comfortable in the bush. He worked for a long time with a lot of skill keeping the flames at bay, before the fire trucks and helicopter arrived. He really did the work of a hero! When the firetrucks arrived a man no one can place who my father had seen working on the other side of the hill came up to him and said ‘I’ve been with you from the beginning’. My father-in-law shook his hand and continued digging and watering. When he looked again the man was gone. None of our neighbors could place him and there was no car. I don’t really know what to do with that information. But if you see how close the fire came to our house you know that whoever that guy was, he was an answer to prayers. thanks for besieging heaven on our behalf. b
