“Goodnight Carlton!” my dad says as I head off to go to bed. As I lay in my warm bed, I start to think about how normal my life had been for the last few weeks. It had been the same routine over and over again. I wake up, I go to school, I go to basketball practice, and then I come home to do it all over again the next day. I was looking for something new and exciting to happen. Unfortunately, my wish was granted.

“Wake up! Wake up!” I could hear the panic in his voice as my dad ran through the house yelling and banging on all of our doors. “There is a fire in the garage!” he screams. I scramble out of bed to investigate all of the commotion. Moments later I stand in the front yard with the rest of my family praying that the fire department comes fast enough to get water on our house to save it from the blaze. I watch as our garage doors fly off of their frames from the explosion of our two cars.

Soon we stand inside our neighbor’s home to escape the sub zero temperatures outside. We turn on the radio to find out that more fire departments are on there way. That doesn’t make us feel good at all. Later an EMT asks us to come and sit in an ambulance. My older brother, who had just recovered from a devastating ACL injury, puts his arm around all of us and says, “Well it looks like we’ve got some more adversity to overcome.” Suddenly friends arrive to see how they can help. They literally give us the clothes off of their backs.

In a couple of hours our family is resting at a local hotel. I try to get some sleep but after what had just happened, there was no way any of us were getting any bit of rest. I wake up to try to make it through a day of school. I can smell the smoke from our clothes and shoes that were saved from our burning house.

Now it is Friday morning, I have no house, I have no clothes, my life has been turned upside down. What do I do now? I turn to my faith, I turn to a loving God. I turn to a savior whose walk up to Golgotha with a cross on his back was much more difficult than a house fire. I think back to a baseball prayer that I had learned. I remember some of the lines like, “Dear God, help me to be a good sport in this game of life. I don’t ask for an easy place in the lineup. If all the hard drives seem to come my way, I thank you for the compliment. Help me remember that you never send a player more trouble than he can handle. And, help me, Lord, to accept the bad breaks as part of the game.” I realize that this prayer refers to much more than just the game of baseball.

Over the next few days we are blessed to be able to stay at a neighbor’s home while we get our lives back in order. We are grateful for the meals that community members have supplied us with. With one of those meals an elementary boy sends a card with the verse of Psalm 46:1-3, 7 which says, “God is our refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea. Though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their swaying…The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

I think of Job and the struggles he went through. I think of folks who have had a much tougher lot in life. People who have had life long illnesses, people who make continual trips to medical facilities, parents who have endured the death of their own children, people that have been tortured by addictions and I realize that what I am going through is very temporary. In a few days I will have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in. There are people in this world that go all of their lives without these things.

As I wake up every morning at 3am with my heart racing or my head aching I grow closer to God. I realize that when life is peachy and things are going great, I don’t recognize God’s presence like I should but when I suffer and need to get through difficult times I turn to God with intensity and thus I grow closer to him. I also realized that when “bad things happen” God’s love is shared. Our community shared very generously with us. There were many evenings that we would sit down and read a card or a note from someone and just cry and nod our heads because we were all so humbled and amazed at the generosity and kindness of people. This is a visual idea of God’s love that was shared with us through this life changing experience.