After Vulnerability

The night lives in a hallowed place in my heart. I’d just spent a week away in Redding, California, learning more about Inner Healing, Healing the Soul. I had called in my goodnights to my husband.
Then I opened Facebook.
Crushing, painful news. My stepchildren were scrambling—were their friends okay? My community had become another headline, and I wasn't home. I’m a minister I wanted to be there.
Quick calls to the airlines. Played the ministry card. Flight moved forward. I then raced across the Sacramento Valley. I called worship leaders—we need to heal through worship. Beginnings were set in motion. Then I drove past a HUGE black curtain in the sky, not realizing I was driving past—the Paradise fire.
My husband called to tell me that Newbury Park, my home city, was on fire. He picked me up from Burbank airport, but the traffic was too crazy so we couldn’t make the prayer vigil that night. Our community was in flight.
Once home I collapsed yet I was convinced we needed to flee to our friends’ home before we got the 1:00 am mandatory call. We left. The call did come, but we were out.
All night on the phone. Where were our kids? Where were they going? Were we all safe? Fire was everywhere.
Then a second fire invaded—Woolsey. We couldn’t even drive to our Ministry Center in Westlake Village, so worship night was unattainable.
We evacuated the next day to a hotel in Ventura for an undetermined time frame. The next morning, we get asked, “when are you leaving?” What? I’d told the hotel to keep the reservation open-ended because we didn’t know. The manager kicked us out.
Shock upon shock. Displacement upon displacement. Trauma upon trauma. My heart hurt. My mind was in a whirl.
We went home. Then the cars drove by with flags on them. Confused, I went next door. Their son, a frequent patron of of Borderline, had slept through it all. Survivors remorse. Two doors down, a dad grieved. His son shot down. Tears. Lots and lots of tears. They still come, even now.
Classes on trauma. Grateful to those in the know. How long do multiple traumas take to heal? Our part? Open our hearts and arms and PRAY.
Worship finally came. Not until the New Year. But with it, one who was locked in pain got free. And a knowing was birthed. We would have the most magnificent Spring the Conejo had ever seen. It was so. All over Southern California, a Super Bloom.
After vulnerability returned to the Conejo Valley, an awakening to our need for each other brought people who had never crossed paths in our once-comfortable community together.
When we saw what we felt inside on the faces of others, in the cries and demonstrations of their wounded souls, we reached for each other.
We congregated on a once-serene street corner and poured out love for our lost ones, compassion and comfort for those who suffered violence and destruction of what they held dear, and we locked arms and held shoulders and prayed and consoled and listened to each other like we never had, with those we’d never known were here and a part of us.
We declared strength and resolve over one another. We gave thanks to our God for sparing lives even in the midst of loss. We grieved and mourned who and what was taken away.
And the rains came, the nourishing of land and souls, the visible and invisible outpouring of grace and mercy and restoration, transforming what had become black and foul and uninhabitable into what is now green and vital and flourishing.
We have much to draw from the well of redemption, if we would but open ourselves to one another and to the One who sends the rain.

Jill R.