Bill and I experienced our first wildfire in November.
We never dreamed it would be on our property.
Three lights: Fire, sunset, porch light
With dear out-of-town friends visiting, we decided to spend a Monday night at our country cottage on Whisper Woods Lake. It’s only 35 minutes from our house but a world away from the city. They planned to make homemade pasta. We were excited. As we neared our place at about 4:30 p.m., I wondered why sunset was so early as I saw a smoky orange haze in the sky
My first thought was who strung white Christmas lights through the woods across from our small lake? Did someone pour a line of gasoline and light it? It took a minute to realize this was a real forest fire.
Grabbing buckets, we ran towards it. We tried dousing the flames with lake water. That was like trying to control an anthill by stomping on it. We saw the fire advancing in lines and patches of flames throughout the woods.
We called 911 and kenneled our dogs.
Our property is so rural I had to drive to the main county road (dodging abandoned mobile homes) so I could open the gate, wait for the volunteer fire department, flag them down, and lead them to the fire. The fire engine couldn’t make it down our narrow dirt access road so the chief followed me in his pickup truck. When he saw the extent of the fire, he realized it wasn’t just some suburban woman overreacting. Click here to see the video Paul Valerio took.
The sheriff came and flew a huge drone over the woods and estimated the fire was affecting about 50 acres on three different properties. Volunteer fire fighters with water backpacks couldn’t begin to contain it. They called in the Wildfire Unit of the Alabama Forestry Commission. By then it was dark. How they got the huge bulldozer down to our property I’ll never know. They started plowing through the woods to create a firebreak.
As the sun set, the woods glowed red and reflected in the water. It was awesome, awful, beautiful, and eerie all at the same time. It was like a scene from The Lord of the Rings with the red eye of Mordor throbbing right there in Vincent, Alabama.
All I could do was stay out of the way, take photos, and pray.
O God, please don’t let anyone be hurt. The firefighters with their water packs, shovels, and axes. Neighbors whizzing around on four-wheelers in the dark. Our friends watering the ground around our cottage.
O God, spare our cottage and our neighbor’s structures. Please don’t let the fire reach the gas line that runs close to our property (imagining a cinema-worthy BOOM!)
O Lord, bring rain. Most of the state of Alabama was in a month-long drought, tinder dry, and under fire bans. (They think the fire started from a neighbor’s weekend campfire.)
After they determined the bulldozer stopped the fire from advancing, the fire chief felt it was safe to let the rest of the fire die out as it reached the water’s edge. Everyone left sooty and tired, but unharmed and satisfied. We celebrated with a very late dinner, pondering what just happened.
We woke the next morning to the smell of lingering smoke and the sound of gentle rain, although there had been only a 30 percent chance of precipitation. Our friends left to return to Georgia. Bill and I tramped through the blackened woods seeing flaming potholes where the fatwood resin in the tree stumps kept burning. It felt like another scene from The Lord of Rings with columns of smoke in a blackened landscape rising around us. Even two weeks later, trees continued to smoke and burn internally.
To the world, it might have looked like an effective controlled burn. But I knew God controlled that fire.
It is ironic that our vision for our Whisper Woods Lake property is based on 1 Kings 19. The prophet Elijah, weary and confused after battling the evil Queen Jezebel, crawls under a broom tree to sleep, eat, whine, and try to hear from God. After he rested, this is what he heard:
“Go, stand on the mountain at attention before God. God will pass by. A hurricane wind ripped through the mountains and shattered the rocks before God, but God wasn’t to be found in the wind; after the wind an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake; and after the earthquake fire, but God wasn’t in the fire; and after the fire a gentle and quiet whisper.” 1 Kings 19:11-12 MSG
What whisper did I hear from God after the fire?
I had been in a prayer drought for many months. What I had been believing was, “God works but maybe not for me.” I could see others whose prayers were answered but I was waiting and running low on faith, feeling alone and confused.
I was like whiny Elijah. Crawling under the broom tree, wondering if I was the last one left on God’s team or if God had forgotten me.
In this spiritual as well as real 911 moment, I prayed and asked others to pray. And they did, believing for me. On the morning after the fire, I could sense God’s whisper as I heard the gentle rain, rain I had convinced myself by the weather app wouldn’t come.
I couldn’t get around God’s specific answers to our prayers:
I prayed no one would get hurt. No one was hurt.
I prayed that no structures would be harmed. The fire was contained to undeveloped land.
I prayed for rain. God sent the rain despite the meteorologists’ calculations.
He answered in ways I didn’t “think” of praying.
The fire chief pointed out that after weeks of low humidity, it was at 100 percent humidity that evening which kept the fire from leaping up into the crown of the trees.
We rarely go to our cottage on a Monday afternoon in November. We arrived “right on time” to get help. If we hadn’t, who knows how long it would have been until someone discovered the fire.
Our neighbors came and helped us. I had been in despair over the huge divide in our nation in the weeks before the election. But in this emergency, there was no Red or Blue. There were just neighbors helping neighbors, asking for nothing in return.
Like with Elijah, God whispered that he was there in my confusion, isolation, and weariness. He heard and answered my prayers right on time. I was humbled by his grace and power to his unbelieving daughter.
In early January we saw green sprouts in the still-black ash along the trail.
Photo by Bill Carroll
It reminded me of Romans 15:13 in the Message:
Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!
He answered beyond my requests.
He was in the fire.
He was the whisper after the fire.
He is the God of green hope.
In my drought of unbelief, he whispered that I am not alone. He is with me. And he sent his reinforcements.
Thank you to all who prayed and all who helped: Vincent Volunteer Fire Department, Harpersville Fire Department, Shelby County Sheriff’s Department, Alabama Forestry Commission Wildfire Unit, our Vincent neighbors, and our friends Paul Valerio and Elizabeth and Connor Butz who helped douse the fire and fed us pasta and left with good stories.
