This piece was originally written for and published in Spiritual Uprising Magazine, which is awesome. You should check them out here.
I’ve been asked before, as I’m sure many of you have, “If your house was on fire and you could only take one thing, what would it be?”
It’s a fun ice breaker, an interesting discussion topic and a unique insight into other people. Of all the THINGS in your life, what do you place the most value on?
In August, my family experienced what it’s like to not have a chance to ask yourself that question when our house, the house I grew up in, burned down.
Sometimes, you don’t get to choose to to simplify your life.
Although the cause of the fire is officially undetermined, we (and the three sets of investigators and engineers who have since been to our house) believe the fire was electrical and started in the kitchen, based on the damage.
Telling someone your house burned down is an awkward and often extremely uncomfortable thing. They don’t know what to say to you, and you don’t know how to explain what happened exactly.
They want to know if anyone was hurt, but they’re scared to ask in case the answer isn’t good (my family was gone at the time of the fire, but two of our dogs passed away from smoke inhalation).
They want to know how much damage was done, but how do you quantify something like the memories and things that fill a house you’ve lived in for 23 years? (To put it simply, the house and everything in it are condemned.)
Although some of the wood furniture and important pictures, etc., from the back of the house were recoverable, the majority of the house and its contents are gone.
It is a simultaneously freeing and absolutely crippling feeling to know that your house and most of the items you’ve ever owned are ruined.
I could go on and on about what it was like to go there after the fire. I was not there the night it happened, but I can tell you from going in the next morning that it was absolutely horrifying. It brings me to tears still to think of my dogs being stuck in there. I pray every day for my sister, who had never really experienced a major loss before, that she can be strong and brave and adjust to our new and different life. I can’t imagine what my mom felt when she pulled up to the house she has worked so hard to pay for and fill with love and the things we love and saw firefighters dousing the shell of it with water.
So sometimes you don’t get to choose simplicity. It chooses you (and all your household items, clothes, etc.)
It would be easy in these times to think “Seriously, God? Our family really hasn’t been through enough, so we needed to literally burn it to the ground?”
After the fire, shopping trips weren’t fun anymore because we were shopping for necessities, rather than new things. Our home wasn’t the same before because my family was living in a hotel, and is still in an apartment. Our family wasn’t the same, because we lost two members of it (and yes, we are those people who consider our dogs a part of our family).
But in those times where it seems like it really might have just been easier to give up, we’ve grown closer as a family. We found humor in the little things (like the dumb magazines 80s magazines someone had randomly kept that flew out of our attic during the fire, the time we’ve spent together going through the house and listing literally everything we own, or the fact that our house being destroyed wasn’t enough, so someone ran into and destroyedour mailbox by accident the day after the house burned down).
For the first time in my life, I FELT prayers. We were genuinely overwhelmed by the support and love we received from friends, family and complete strangers. From the firefighters who fought the blaze (one of whom came back the next day just to check on us) to our neighbors who called 911 and saved one of our dogs, from the coworkers and friends I have across the country to the complete strangers, the outpouring of love and kindness was and still is incredible.
Through Facebook, I am friends with cancer survivors, people who have lost close family members and friends and people who have experienced tragedies firsthand that I could not fathom. The fact that these people found the kindness in their hearts to worry about me, pray for me, and contact me to tell me I was in their thoughts and prayers was beautiful and selfless. I only hope I can bring comfort to others one day the way I was shown comfort in my time of need.
Luckily, my family has insurance and will be able to recover much of what is lost materially. But it’s funny, because in many ways this has been an excuse to not replace things. We simply don’t need them. Through this trial, God set us free from the material needs we once had.
Going through the ashes of our house and accounting every thing we owned on an insurance spreadsheet was a tedious, kind of awful experience, but it was also a huge eyeopener.
Why did I ever need 70 t-shirts? Couldn’t someone have really used those more than me? They were sitting in a drawer in my room when the fire started. What about my 15 coats? Some people don’t even have one.
We’ve been much more sparing in replacing our things than we were in amassing them in the first place. We didn’t Black Friday shop this year, but instead spent time together just hanging out as a family.
One cool trick I’ve learned since the fire is to turn all your hangers around at the beginning of the season and donate all the clothes that are still turned around at the end. It is something I will do from now on.
Of the clothes I had with me, not in the house, I’ve gone through and donated many things, or given them to friends (I know I feel awesome when someone wants to give me something I think is cute, your friends probably will, too).
More than anything, the fire taught me to be grateful for the simplicity we’ve found ourselves with. I’m grateful that my family is alive and thriving. I’m grateful that I was able to recover some pictures and journals out of my old room. I’m grateful for the insurance coverage we have that will replace (at least materially) what was lost.
Having your house burn down is not something that most people will ever experience. But you can ask yourself that question—if my house were to burn down, what would I want to save? Once you’ve saved that, the rest doesn’t really seem to matter as much anymore.
In case you can’t read the tiny writing, here’s what it says:
PBR & PEARLS 