I was angry in the weeks proceeding the fire. I had told the Lord plainly that I needed beauty minus the ashes. I just wanted beauty. I pleaded with Him angrily and reasoned with my thoughts and hoped my thoughts would be heard as prayers I couldn’t mumble. Aching for a season of beauty without the taste of suffering was my heart’s plea. I begged for no more ashes. A fire passed through the Lord’s hands.
On a Sunday afternoon 11 months ago, while alone in our home, we had a house fire. I sometimes still smell the smoke in my hair. Life is like that.
Summer 2018 held death and life and weddings and graduations and loss unavoidable and necessary. Great tangible loss tangled up with the all-consuming grief of my personal childhood horrors. Sweat dripped of relationships that were created for wholeness that left me broken. Ashes touched all of my todays and nows and smelled of my yesterdays and lifetimes ago. Ashes are not easily swept into piles of then and now. Daily terror from the popcorn ceilings held in my mind’s eye from decades ago and excited smiles of new life mingle together in ashes. Ashes don’t know where they belong except they are everywhere. Ashes order attachments.
Words that ring in my head like church bells and not like the incessant tinnitus that plagues me are,” Suzanne, I pray that this season will give you the place to order your attachments.” These words were gently spoken over me on May 7th just a few hours and one sleep after I stood in my firey home unsure of what was happening and what I should save. Ordering my attachments is saving my life. This suffering and loss are Holy Ground.
I made very few phone calls that day and I took even fewer calls. It was more than the fire. It was more than the fear. It was more than the shock. It was the ordering of my attachments on Holy Ground. In the days that followed and still today nearly a year later, my whole being cried out: move, fix, problem solve. My safety was built on the muscle memory of “the doing” of all the things required internally and externally to keep myself safe. Yet, safety was still stolen from me. Early May left me with no way to move or fix or problem solve. Holy Ground left me immobilized as Holy Ground should. The question that whispered in me during those hours and even now is: “What will He do to save your life, a life that no one understands is at risk?”
Holy Ground is not the same as safety. Peacemaking is not the same as peacekeeping. Peacemaking on Holy Ground is messy and painful and gut-wrenching and necessary for me to stay alive. Making peace has found me sobbing in a house without walls over my children’s mementos and my childhood horrors. Ashes do not discriminate when you are laying on a concrete slab grieving losses that you know you are only just discovering. In a fire, inventory is taken and the lists of losses are specific. Things were being named for me: antique cherry wood spindle bed, Nike shorts size small, Apple iPhone 6. Things were being counted for me: cosmetics-limit 25 at $5 each, women’s sandals-5 at $35.
Naming things and counting moments became life-saving, unavoidable, and necessary because unexpected freedom comes from naming and counting loss and suffering and life-giving relief comes when you are cracked wide open trying to count your blessings and the blessings that come from someone naming your loss makes a way for life-giving grief. We have rebuilt. I left pieces of me in the ashes that have been absorbed into the dirt packed around our family home and what is buried beneath those pieces has shaken me. I still don’t understand exactly who I am underneath the layers of life that the fire cracked wide open, but I know somehow life chose me and I’m left wondering is it possible God would use the hottest embers of an all-consuming fire to save my life while it was also burning so much of it away?
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