Love Notes

by Bill Love

Having just learned the Texas Two-Step, I was trying my new skill on a Saturday night. Figuring even as an English major I could count to two and, if Texans could learn it, so could I. It’s a little more complicated than that: there are actually four steps, and I was in California.

The friend who taught me and encouraged me to get out on the floor said, as Californians careened past and occasionally into us, “They dance like they drive,” which is not a compliment, as anyone who’s been on the L. A. freeways would know.

As we stepped outside for a breath of air as fresh as the night had to offer, we faced the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. They were silhouetted in the inky black of the night. This night they were also lined with bright orange lines of the fires.

The fire, which started in Fontana some 25 miles or so to the east, had been blown west by the wind and was now 40 miles wide. That particular fire had gone almost as far west as it would go. A fire had burned a year earlier, and there was only a year’s worth of growth for fuel.

I went home immediately, thought about what I would take if I had to evacuate. Important papers, floppy disks with my sermons on them, and my dog Murray. Not my golf clubs or my guitar. They could be replaced. Not photos nor my Mother’s china. The pictures in my head are more vivid than photos, and the best and worst of my parents are already within me.

I woke Sunday morning to a call from a woman who couldn’t get through to her mother, a member of the church I serve. When I got to church, I learned that part of the town within a mile and a half of where I live had been evacuated. Over sixty homes would be lost.

At Sunday School, we shared what we knew. I was scheduled to preach a stewardship sermon. It seemed there was something more important to talk about. I talked about the fire.

I talked about Second church, Nashville, which uses its building as an arm of its mission unlike any church I’ve seen. They lost their building to a fire, but God and the people God called to be the church are still there.

I talked about Palm Coast, Florida, where a fire burned 110,000 acres in 1985. I was evacuated that time.

Then and now, some stayed as the fire approached, turning hoses on their homes in an effort to save them, abandoning their efforts only when required to by authorities. The fire was capricious, taking one home and leaving another, taking mementos from a lifetime, even generations, of a family.

The fire took from us our sense of control, much of which was an illusion to begin with, but even the control we do have did not seem as safe, and nature itself seemed hostile.

In Palm Coast in the aftermath of the fire, I also saw people whose lives collapsed before a world whose fairness had been snatched from us, whose markers of reliability no longer seemed trustworthy.

Perhaps it is not so very different from the writer of Ecclesiastes who wrote, All is vanity!

I remembered the words of William Sloane Coffin after the death of his son Alex. He took comfort in knowing when his son died that “God’s was the first of all hearts to break.” As we faced the fire and what it could do and what we surrendered to it, God was with us and close enough for God’s heart to break.

Now, even as the fire is past, in our weakness, into our seemingly capricious world, in the midst of our fear and trembling, unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given. On Good Friday, God’s was the first of all hearts to break, and on Easter, Christ and we became victorious over all caprice.

Peace on earth; good will toward all people, was the song the angels sang, though I’ve never heard it put to a tune that was good for the Texas Two-Step.

LOVE NOTES writer Bill Love sang his latest
country ballad at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville
recently. “The Words That Jesse Said” is based on a
true story heard at a funeral about
the James brothers, American outlaws.

Bill Love is interim senior pastor at
Claremont Presbyterian Church
in Claremont, CA.