fire

It's happening again. Flames are roaring through our home, racing up and down the stairs, burning from room to room, filling the air with thick, choking smoke. The fire is burning up the joy, and truth, and trust in our home. It lies dormant, smoldering out of sight sometimes, and then, as if some new gust of oxygen refuels the flames, the fire rises up and scorches every corner of our home, every niche of our lives, and threatens to consume the very faith that allows us to breathe. It's been burning a long time now. The smell of the fire, the heat felt through the walls and doors is the new normal, the ever-present spirit of destruction that resides in our home, watching for signs of hope or confidence or renewal so it can rise up and consume them before they prevail. I don't know when this fire started, or where it actually came from. Was it carried into our home from other burning homes? Have I sparked this fire myself? Did I build a tinder box, a home filled with dead undergrowth ripe for fire? Is this some perverse challenge to my struggle to trust in Christ, as we are told we must? Am I being shown that all our failed attempts to douse this fire are somehow prideful, self-centered efforts, doomed to failure because we have reached out to the wisdom of counselors and professionals and our instincts as parents? Is that it? Or are we just fools, looking for lessons and healing and reconciliation and rebirth from a cold, empty, heartless cosmos in which flames burn at random, without regard for faith or family. Is there a lesson here at all? Or just that we are powerless to keep the fire away, that it's bigger and hotter and more persistent than our hope. Is the truth of the world that anonymous individuals and families are just not that important, and in the grand scheme of things, they can be destroyed and forgotten and the cosmos just spins? The cruelest joke is that we have ascended, as a species, to the point where we are capable of deluding ourselves about our value. We carry around a default setting to pursue happy endings and resolution, when life itself, our real world, the petri-dish in which we struggle keeps taunting us that we're idiots for thinking that way. The fire in our home cares not one bit for us, it just burns because it's fire.