The trauma of fire

 I had intended to write about something else this week, but the fires in Los Angeles have grabbed my heart and I need to reflect. The news today has the combined fires covering an area as big as Washington, DC. That’s huge. More than eight million people are under critical fire risks and around 105,000 people are under mandatory evacuation order, with another 89,000 under evacuation warnings. More than 12,000 structures have been destroyed.

These are the statistics and numbers, but they don’t bear the weight of the trauma people are experiencing.

I grew up in San Diego County and the Santa Ana winds were a yearly part of our experience. I remember being frightened at the sound of the wind, with tree limbs falling near the house. I especially remember the year when the wild fires burned in the hills close to our town. In bed at night, I could actually see the reflection of fire pulsing on the walls. The smell of smoke filled the house, not enough to cause evacuation, but just enough to terrify one nine-year-old girl. The fires always skipped our town, thanks be to God.

During those years, my grandparents and a favorite aunt and uncle lived in Altadena, and I loved spending time in their home. They always made me feel special, especially Grandma. Several other aunts, uncles, and cousins lived in the area; Altadena was a Forsythe family gathering place. The grandparents, aunts and uncles all died years ago, but the memories are strong. I don’t know what area of Altadena they lived in—being a kid, that wasn’t important—but it’s likely that it has been affected by this fire.

Years later, Hal and I attended Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Many of our friends and professors lived in Altadena, just up the hill from the seminary. Every summer we house-sat for Professor Colin Brown and his wife Olive. Dr. Brown was British and they went home to England for three weeks each summer to be with family. So we got to live in their lovely house, enjoy their pool, and, especially, care for their large rose gardens. In addition to New Testament theology, Dr. Brown was passionate about his roses, and we took our responsibility very seriously, watering according to a precise pattern he had set up and carefully documented for us. It was a pleasure to be so immersed in the beauty of the roses. It has been years since the Browns retired and moved back to England.

Just down the street from the Browns, our friend and colleague in the doctoral program, Stuart Dauermann, lived. Stuart is a Jewish Messianic rabbi. We spent some time in his home and even attended his synagogue one Saturday morning.

And a few blocks over, my doctoral mentor, Dan Shaw, lived with his wife and a houseful of books and mementos from his service as a Wycliffe Bible translator. Family photos covered the walls. Dan and his second wife, Georgia, have since sold their house and moved to a smaller home.

I have warm memories of time spent in Altadena homes.

Stuart and his wife, Naomi, moved to New York City last year. He now serves as rabbi to a Messianic synagogue in that city. Needless to say, news of the fires has devastated him. He found out from a friend that the entire block where they lived was destroyed by the fire. That means the home where they lived for many years, Dr. Brown’s home, and Dr. Shaw’s home. I think of those roses burning.

Recently Stuart wrote the following in Facebook (I’ve asked permission to quote him):

“In July 2023, I went for a walk in Altadena and prayed. I told God that my wife is a California girl and loves her gardening and hiking, and I’m a New York guy and I love New York, and we have three children and a grandson there. I said I don’t even know what to want. I know I can’t afford to live in New York! I told God, “I don’t even know how long I’ll live. But what I do know is my times are in your hands.” Then I told him, “all I can really say is that I want whatever time that remains to be fruitful.” And when I said that, I had a sense of profound confirmation as though I had touched the most foundational of concerns. 

“A short time after that, I got a phone call about this position in New York. Because I thought that God was in that prayer, Naomi and I said yes to moving across country within six weeks. 

“If I had not prayed, and if God had not spoken, and if [several other events had not happened] today Naomi and I would be picking among the embers for the remnants of our shattered lives. 

“It is extremely sobering, and I feel a hushed and chastened awe.”

                                                        Altadena, 2025

I share this because it gives a personal connection to the fires. Of course it’s far worse for the people directly affected, for those who’ve lost their homes and photos and family treasures, not to mention furniture, clothes, and all the other stuff necessary to live a normal life. Their lives have passed beyond normal and will be forever changed.

Which leaves me asking what more I can do besides watch the news, lament, pray, and give to help meet the needs of the new homeless. We live in a dangerous world and I know I can’t take my personal safety for granted, even here in this lovely and protected retirement community.

I take comfort in the heart-felt prayers in the Psalms:

I love the Lord for he heard my voice;
he heard my cry for mercy….
The cords of death entangled me,
the anguish of the grave came upon me;
I was overtaken by trouble and sorrow.
Then I called on the name of the Lord:
“O Lord, save me!”
The Lord is gracious and righteous;
our God is full of compassion.
The Lord protects the simplehearted;
when I was in great need, he saved me.
Be at rest once more, O my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you.
(Psalm 116:1-7) 

While I thank God for his goodness, I ponder how he can use me in responding in this present time of trauma.

Flickers of joy

 I will try hard not to complain, but these last three weeks have been a comedy of the absurd. We never laughed in the midst of it all, not even once.

It’s all about getting older and the inevitable rebellion of body parts.

And it’s about my husband who has given permission for me to write about it.

Three weekends ago he came down with stomach/intestinal pain that seemed different from what he’s experienced before. So we did what we usually do in these circumstances. He took it easy, ate bland food, and we decided to wait it out. Most things get better in time without medical intervention. But after two days Hal told me to take him in to emergency. Enough was enough. I did and it turned out to be diverticulitis. Again. We were in time. The good doctor put him on a ten-day regimen of antibiotics with grim sounding names. We’ve met these fellows before and have not developed a friendship, I’m sorry to say.

Next, while still on medication, he felt a hernia begin bulging out of his intestines. A lump on his abdomen. Gross, no? So we got an appointment with our primary care doctor who miraculously agreed to see us right away. She wrote out a reference to an intestinal surgeon. We got an appointment a week away, and, in the meantime, a friend loaned us a belt that put pressure on the hernia, helping it stay in place. Great relief.

The relief didn’t last long. Hal began feeling pain in his neck and shoulders, something unusual for him. His back problems are located in the lower back. This was new. The pain grew with each day but we decided again to wait it out.

Our appointment with the intestinal surgeon was Friday morning. We got ready early and walked out to the car with enough time to make it to the doctor’s office. As I approached the car, I pressed the unlock button on the remote and wondered why the light didn’t blink. Too much sun, I figured. Hard to see. But we discovered it wasn’t the sun at all. The car was “dead.” Totally unresponsive. We called around and found a driver, but by then we knew we’d arrive late. I call the doctor’s office to tell them we were running a little late, and the receptionist told us the doctor was on a tight schedule and we’d have to reschedule, bulging hernia and all. Our appointment was now some ten days off. “God knows all this,” we told ourselves. “We’re in his hands.”

Hal called our auto repairman and he came over. Turns out it wasn’t just a recharge but a new battery we needed. The shop took care of it that day. (Some things run smoothly, thank God.)

At 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning, Hal woke me up, told me he couldn’t stand the neck pain any longer. We needed to go to the ER again. Turns out it was good we did. The doctor (a different one this time around) put him on a scary combination of morphine and cortical steroids and we went home, hoping this would be our last trip.

It was (so far) and Hal has been able to limit his intake of morphine. The pain is lessening, leaving us free to attend to the hernia. Our rescheduled appointment is still a week off. The story hasn’t ended.

We’re realizing that at our time of life, this show will likely keep going on and on, hopefully with some long intermissions.

Now for the good part. Saturday evening our son, daughter (both now in their fifties!), and two grandchildren came over to pray for Grandpa. We all gathered around him on the bed and laid hands (carefully) on him. We thanked God for his power and love, asked for physical and emotional healing, encouraged, and even gave some prophetic words about future ministry. Then the kids prayed for me and my chronic dizziness. The prayer meeting lasted over an hour. We were especially moved by our 18-year-old granddaughter’s insightful and impassioned prayers. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be ministered to by your kids and grandkids. It’s good. We all felt that something real had been accomplished.

Hal woke up the next morning feeling good, although the pain returned by the evening, to a lesser degree. We know that, while some healings are instantaneous, God often heals in a gradual way. At least for us that seems to be the case. We feel that God is healing through the combination of prayer and medication. And possibly surgery.

Sunday afternoon we went to church online. One of our favorite places is Woodland Hills Church in Minneapolis. Greg Boyd has long been a favorite author, and his preaching is always rich, scholarly, but down-to-earth and anointed. He had just been through a grizzly three weeks, worse than ours, that involved five trips to the ER, including one for his wife who fell and broke her ankle in the middle of her husband’s trials. He preached from his home as he is not able to go out yet. But he was as articulate, funny, and profound as usual.

He told about his misadventures in detail, but focused on the lesson God was teaching him in all of this. It centered on the strange New Testament coming together of suffering and joy. Take the Apostle James’ strange counter-intuitive command to “consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (James 1:2). The various verses on “participating in the sufferings of Christ” came to his mind. At one point he had a vision (through his imagination) of Christ’s excruciating, but voluntary, suffering on the cross, and what a privilege it is to count our troubles as sharing in those sufferings.

Boyd told us that, while he didn’t exactly break out in laughter, he began feeling flickers of joy, laying there on the emergency room table. Joy in suffering is not natural or easy, but the experience of pain and trauma is the classroom for learning joy, he told us.

That sermon came at the right time for us and we, too, are sensing flickers of joy.

As I wrote above, this particular story is not yet over, but we’re heading into it with lighter hearts—thanks mainly to our family’s prayers, helped along by sound teaching from our brother, Greg Boyd.

It makes me think that joy is an excellent tool to carry with us into the challenges and potential traumas of growing older. I love it when old people laugh. I think I’ll join their ranks.