It Could Have Been Me

My friend Lucy in Tanzania sent me this text this morning: Habari za leo, dada. Nyumbani kwako ni sawa? Ninaomba kwa wewe sana. Upo wapi?

Roughly translated: How are you, sister? Is your house okay? I am praying hard for you. Where are you located?

When a friend from the other side of the world, who gets her news from local Tanzanian radio, knows about the fires in Southern California, that’s when you know you know the events happening around you are a big deal. 

I woke up on Wednesday morning to the howling of sirens and the smell of smoke and looked out my second-story window to see a dark plume in the distance. 

“It looks close,” I told Gil. “But I know the mountains can play tricks on you.” The mountains surrounding us on three sides had been on fire in September (over 40,000 acres in the end). Those fires had seemed close too, but stayed miles away.

I jumped onto Facebook and saw my local community groups buzzing with chatter. I was right this time – the fire was close. The Moose Lodge, not half a mile from our house, was engulfed in flames. 

I instantly tensed. Just the day before, we heard reports of the fires ravaging Los Angeles, just 90 miles east of us. We were experiencing the same Santa Ana winds turning sparks into infernos in the Pacific Palisades. For 30 hours, wind had been shrieking around our house, rattling the windows. Sometimes it was like a 5-year-old hyped on sugar, picking up patio cushions and throwing them gleefully into the air, and other times, it was that same child in a rage, red-faced, kicking and roaring with fury. 

As I sat on my bed and watched that plume of smoke not a half mile away, dread settled in my stomach. Poised like a cat, I mentally listed everything I would grab and where it was located, calculating how much time I would need. The day before, in the Palisades, fire had taken only 25 minutes to scorch 200 acres—about the same distance from the Moose Lodge to our house. 

Almost five years ago, I packed up a life of 16 years into 12 boxes in four days. This time, I knew I might get only five minutes.

Thirty minutes later, the smoke dissipated, resulting from the quick action of the 11 fire engines and 70 firefighters who rushed to the scene. The building was gone, but our community was safe.  

Life went on. Gil and the kids left for school. I taped up the gap in my sliding back door where the wind was rudely adorning my kitchen with dust; I rescued plants and garbage cans that had blown over while my hair whipped around my face. 

But I did not watch my house burn down. 

Like a near miss on the freeway, when you breathe a sigh of relief and go on with your day, it’s only as the minutes and hours go on that you begin to contemplate all the “what ifs.” What if that deviant wind had picked up one spark from that fire and carried it to a tree in our park? Later in the afternoon, someone from the neighborhood next to ours posted that embers from the Moose Lodge fire landed in the junkyard behind a bicycle shop – thankfully noticed and quickly extinguished.

I watch the news of the apocalypse taking place less than 100 miles away and think, It could have been me.

Why wasn’t it? Why them and not me? 

I believe in the providence of God. I believe that every spark, every ember, every gust of wind is under His control. Accidents don’t happen for God. Not a single calamity takes place without His knowledge or permission. 

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things. (Is. 45:7)

Of course, that doesn’t answer all the questions. Why them? I don’t know. Why not me? I don’t know that either. I am not more deserving than them. I didn’t pray more than them. And who knows? It could still be me tomorrow.

Just because I don’t see a reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one. 

Tim Keller, in The Reason for God, explains it this way:

Tucked away within the assertion that the world is filled with pointless evil is a hidden premise, namely, that if evil appears pointless to me, then it must be pointless.

Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Again we see lurking within supposedly hard-nosed skepticism an enormous faith in one’s own cognitive faculties. If our minds can’t plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can’t be any! This is blind faith of a high order.

If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.

It could have been me. There’s no reason it shouldn’t have been. May I let that knowledge sink into my soul and sober me. Nothing is permanent on this earth. I could be the wealthiest, most powerful person in the world and still lose everything. May I fix my eyes on what is eternal, on what cannot be lost – human souls, their destiny, and the kingdom of God. 

For that truly is my only purpose, my only motivation, my only hope. 

Tim Keller sums it up this way:

If we embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus is God and that he went to the Cross, then we have deep consolation and strength to face the brutal realities of life on earth. We can know that God is truly Immanuel—God with us—even in our worst sufferings.

God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.

It could have been me who lost everything. But even then, I would only have lost that which I can’t hold onto anyway. What is eternal is already mine.