Saturday, January 11, 2025
Saturday after Epiphany
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Fire
Yesterday Andi’s sonogram showed a healthy baby. The boys spent the morning with us while Andi was at the doctor and working at school. Miles and Jasper helped us light the first fire of the winter in our fireplace, and they tended it for two hours, feeding it small papers and cardboard, fanning the flames with the bellows, searching outside for sticks to poke and prod the Duraflame log while we learned more about fire and how it works from the internet, asking and answering questions we didn’t know we had.
The Lord takes delight in his people.
Then we turned on YouTube video from Los Angeles. I’ve watched two movies about the San Francisco earthquake and taken many photos of the Chicago Water Tower, which survived the Great Fire of 1871 while much of Chicago burned to the ground. Today it houses a tourist office and art gallery, dwarfed by the Hancock building and every other skyscraper in the neighborhood.
Of course we didn’t see live pictures of any of those older disasters. But this fire, which continues to burn mostly out of control and has all week, came right into our living room. It feels close and personal. Already, says The New York Times, “it has consumed an area greater than the entire city of San Francisco.”
Friends in southern California are regular folks like us, sometimes working in the movies or music world, sometimes not. Some who were able to return showed reporters, and the rest of us, pieces of what remained from their homes – a small square of tile from her kitchen, a locket, a single strangely unscorched photograph. One man wept. “I’ve lived here fifty-one years. In a moment, everything is gone.”
We heard one reporter think out loud about the future for these fifty thousand families. A hundred thousand? The fire is not finished. Three million California home insurance policies could not be renewed last year. What happens now?
In Pasadena the Rose Bowl is a refuge for some for the moment, ten days after the Buckeyes beat the Ducks and floats covered with flowers drove six miles through the sunshine. This weekend’s NFL playoff game has been moved to Arizona. What happens now, to each of the people who have lost everything? Margaret and I remembered the Austin Disaster Relief Network, where Aki and I volunteer. Donations to the American Red Cross must be pouring in. Countless men and women will reach out to help somehow, however they can.
I thought of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in Revelation, the destroyers – conquest, war, famine, and death. In this fire, only a few people have been found dead, but I wonder about the survival of the city, and the thousands who are not dead but are now alone, abandoned by protection which they took for granted. From a note on Google: “The Four Horsemen represent the slow unraveling of the world.”
Next to the YouTube videos of the Pacific Palisades was a video of a drone flying above Lahina in Maui, where wind-driven fires in August 2023 destroyed everything. Hurricanes tore apart a beach village we have visited for several years running called Port Aransas, four times in a hundred years. Galveston tells the same story. When disaster strikes, people rebuild.
But then I think of devastation, famines and war where rebuilding is mostly impossible.
We can watch as much live footage as we want, but as I do I for one become much too numb to all of this “unraveling.” Movies and books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road turn my comfortable confidence upside down. Just science fiction? McCarthy envisions “an apocalyptic event that upended civilization and scorched the entire planetary ecology, leaving behind a vast cloud enveloping Earth.”
We know that we belong to God, and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One.
I am getting old. Sometimes, as T. S. Eliot predicted, I “wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Do I dare to eat a peach?” he continues. Do I dare to think of the Four Horsemen, of the “unraveling of the world?” It might be easier for me with less time ahead of me on earth than the baby Andi is carrying, who has his whole life ahead of him. God is in charge, and I am not and never will be.
And we also know that the Son of God has come and given us discernment to know the one who is true: his son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
Children, be on your guard against idols.
(1 John 5, Psalm 149, Matthew 4, John 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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