Rev. Doug and Kelly Floyd

Reflection After the Fire

Doug

So we’re going to talk a little bit about the fire, but also about just some reflections that the Lord put on my heart this week. So Monday morning I woke up at five, a little bit earlier than normal, but around that time to get ready for dialysis. So I have dialysis Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I usually get up at 05:30, start getting ready, so I woke up at five and while I was taking a shower, I began to smell, I didn’t know what I smelled, but it seemed like it was some kind of electrical, something. I didn’t know if something was burning or what. So immediately when I got out of the shower, I began to try to find the source of the smell and I walked through the upstairs and couldn’t find it, but I could continue to smell it, so I knew it was there. I thought I better just go ahead and wake Kelly up, get her to help. So I woke her up. You want to tell your part? We hadn’t rehearsed this… just we go through the house and stuff.

Kelly:

When he woke me up, I can’t remember exactly, but I think I grabbed my phone, which I kept on my nightstand and I started running through the house and it was like some kind of grace was on me that I never thought it was a fire, that never even entered my mind. I just started running through the house, looking for the source, where is this coming from? And I ran into the other far end of the house into the kitchen and looked at the stove, looked at everything, and I saw in the floorboard, we had a vent near the sink and I saw smoke coming out of that vent. And so I turned to go back to the house to where Doug was searching the other areas of the house.

Doug

And I had gone down into the basement, but I didn’t go in our garage, I just went in the basement, many of you’ve been in our basement and the power didn’t work down there, so I knew something’s wrong. And then the fire alarms went or the smoke alarms went off down there. At that point, I thought we need to get out of our house, we don’t know what’s going on, we need to get out of it. So I ran upstairs and I did grab my iPad, actually I think I might have had no, I guess I grabbed and put on some house shoes and I actually had some clothes on cause I was getting ready to go to dialysis, and Kelly just had on her gown and we ran out to the front.

Kelly:

And I had a pair of tennis shoes by the front door, so I put those on and we went to the front porch and called, I had the house phone in one hand and my cell phone in the other, and I tried to use the house phone and it wouldn’t work. So I used my cell phone, it was 05:42 the first time that we called 911 and we told them we just have smoke all through our house and we don’t see a fire, and another, I guess, kind of that dumbness that was over me because it was just smoke and I didn’t see fire, I opened a couple windows because I was trying to let this smoke out, which is the worst thing you can do. So we had a little park bench on our porch that we scooted off the porch as we made these calls, and then my second call, I called my mom who lives down the street from us and said, “can you bring me some clothes? I’m standing in my yard, our house is filled with smoke.” So…

Doug:

So we sat there and then Kelly said, “Maybe we ought to get the car out of the garage.”

Kelly

So he could go to dialysis.

Doug:

So we ran down to the garage, and the garage door was open, and then the garage door on her side was going up and down, and the garage was engulfed in flames. I realized I couldn’t get in there, and so what time was that? At about 5:55. Kelly’s wedding was helping us make all the safe decisions…

Kelly:

So we moved our bench further away and we sat on our bench and we did call 911 back and said, “Oh, okay, we do see flames now, there are flames.” So we called them back and then we sat on our bench and we moved it back and then we saw the power go out and our power lines are external, they hang over the driveway. So we moved our park bench even further, and we called 911 again, because it felt like forever. We’re like, do you remember we called you? Of course, they did, and so we sat on our bench, and I videotaped and took pictures, and we just grieved as we watched it.

Doug:

So from the time you first called them, what was the timeline?

Kelly:

05:42 and at six o’clock, it was completely engulfed.

Doug:

We knew then that the house was… Everything was going to be gone. And so I wrote this little note, this is from an idea from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, which I have mentioned here before, but much of what we do in life is preparing for unthinkable moments and the small decisions and responses prepare us for ultimate moments. There’s not that many ultimate moments in our lives, but when we have those ultimate moments, they sort of alter everything and we have to know how to behave in those moments, and many times we discover what’s inside us in those moments. Sometimes it’s just a matter of when somebody pulls out in front of me in a car and something else comes out other than price care, then I see what’s in me.

Doug:

Those kind of moments bring out what’s already in us. And so I have to train myself, I had to actually in that particular instance, I said that because I had to learn how to be gracious when I drove. This is a big character change for me to learn how to drive slower and to not get mad at everybody on the road, which I did at one time.

Doug:

So once this fire took off, Kelly’s mom arrives, I have to go to dialysis, it’s not something you can miss, and so she whisks me away to dialysis. And then I want you to tell them what happens in the meantime. For the rest of the morning, I’m sitting at dialysis alone, that’s when I started making notes. Kelly had no time to reflect this week, she’s been going nonstop the whole week. I had three days of four hour periods where I, all I could do is sit. And so I’m sitting alone there thinking about the fire and stuff while she’s in the middle of stuff, so tell them what, it’s pretty interesting, what happens next.

Kelly:

So we had neighbors to come out and pray for us, bring us water, bring us food, sat there with us. Some of them offered their home. One couple said, “We’re going on vacation, we’ll be gone, you’re welcome to stay in our house while we’re gone.” And different pastors, one of the firemen was a pastor, the pastor, there’s another pastor in our neighborhood that’s newly to the area, and he came and prayed for us and our entire family at some point, everybody came to see us. Eric came, Jim came, friends, other friends came and my sister made phone calls and a friend of ours was making phone calls and the red cross was there.

Kelly:

So of course the fire marshal, the police are interviewing us and are asking questions, and so we just kind of going through everything and we did capture a lot on our phone as well as our neighbors did as well. We have to send all of that to them, but we were just bombarded immediately with… Of course, we announced it, we told people and so immediately everybody responded and that was the beautiful thing in all of this is the love and the care and the concern. And that’s really the most touching, and the only thing that’s really made me cry is when someone has come up and said, “I’m sorry.” Or “What can I do?” And that’s what’s been so meaningful to us.

Doug:

So now I wrote down when I was on dialysis a series of words, and just quick brief reflection on them in relation to this fire. One of the things, when a person dies, I usually encourage the family to rehearse the memories of that person regularly, in fact, we don’t even do it enough, but on a person’s… The way we do it with the saints of old, when they had died every year we remember their days, we rehearsed their… We remember them, we remember their story. So if we did that for one another, and so while we were sitting on that park bench before I left, we were also remembering how wonderful that house had been, it was a blessing to us.

Doug:

And so how many good memories we had there, people, and they all involve lots of people, usually house concerts or movies, or even St. Brendan’s, we were meeting there on Sunday nights before we started came here. And so the habit of remembering, it’s easy for humans to remember bad things and to become bitter, embittered in life. And so the discipline of remembering blessings in spite of whatever bad happens. So for me, when the house is burning and it’s obvious, it’s gone, all I can think about is how good it was, it was a treasure and I’m grateful for it, so I’m not bitter, I was grateful.

Kelly:

We always felt like our home was a gift of God and it was not ours, but it was ours to share.

Doug:

Yeah. So every time we came home over the course of our, I mean, maybe not every time, many times when we came home, we would say, “Look at that house, it’s a gift of God. Thanks be to God.”

Kelly:

We’d say “What a beautiful house, we are so blessed.” As we would pull in the driveway.

Doug:

And so I thought that was my first response when it was burning down, and so this was another word I wrote down was gratitude. Since we preached by the lectern, we don’t always preach thematic sermons, but a big idea that I’ve often tried to teach people is gratitude is a habit and it’s as well as complaint. So we can choose to either be people who practice, a small habit of gratitude, or we can overwhelm our gratitude with complaint. And it seemed to me that a small little pattern of thanking God for the house and when we actually lost it, that’s how that came to mind was us thanking him for it because he’s so faithful. But then I wrote another word down: limitation. Sometimes it’s important to let go of things. And so Kelly had a funny thing, well we both used to do, but I’m going to have her tell it, that relates to limitation and the burning of the house.

Kelly:

So we lived in the county and so we can have a little burn pile to burn our brush, and so in our backyard we would pile our brush and leaves and things like that, and over time we had had a little phrase, you know how families come up with little phrases about things, and so if something didn’t work or quit working or messed up or we were frustrated with something, we would make the comment, well, let’s just throw it on the burn pile. So that’s kind of our phrase, throw it on the burn pile.

Doug:

And we told my family that and they all started saying it, they don’t even have burn piles. So Kelly decided after we got pictures of the house totally burned down, tell them what you said.

Kelly:

I said that I went and took a picture of the burn pile, which didn’t burn. So we sent it to his family.

Doug:

Then she told me to tell them, well, we decided to throw everything on the burn pile. Yeah, I was especially if I was a really good black preacher, which I’m not, but I used to preach in black church, not very good for… My brother said whenever they started getting to shouting, I would get quiet and wait till it calmed down. I never knew how to ride the wave. This is a time I would say there’s a lot of things in life that we need to throw on the burn pile. There’s a lot of things about letting go.

Doug:

We hold onto too many things, material things, but obviously, we hold onto too many emotional things, and so the habit of letting go. And the other thing I wrote down here we go through… Everybody in here has already gone through traumas and we’ll go through more, it’s just part of life. And these traumas can be times of letting go and resting in God’s faithfulness.

Doug:

But in spite of what even Kelly and I experienced this week, which was pretty devastating, it’s nothing like what refugees experience. So the other thing you can in our own pain is be empathetic toward those who are suffering more, because the refugees in one sense, this seems are ironic to me that the way we respond to our, we have to do this, but we have nothing, everything I’m wearing today, except for the clerical guard is bought this week. So what is the response that we have to make to the fire, where we had to go shopping, which is such an American thing, but a refugee doesn’t go shopping.

Doug:

They lose everything and they may never have a home again, some relocate here, but I think, I can’t remember what the number is, last I checked it was over 80 million refugees in the world and a large portion of those over half I think are children. And they’ll never go home, some of them will never go home. So we need to have passion, compassion for those who suffer in our own suffering, we need to connect with the suffering. And so I don’t think what we have experienced, it is painful, but it is nothing compared to suffering so many people in our world. But in the midst of it, God is faithful even to the refugees. So this week am I reading, have to read that.

Kelly:

Psalm 37:7 wait patiently for the Lord.

Doug:

God is absolutely faithful. He’s absolutely faithful. He will make it all right, even for the refugees in the end, the work of the cross will make things right. Amen.

Doug:

So we look to the cross of Christ, which brings me to another word I wrote down, is hope. And of course, when things like this happen, people encourage you and tell you, well now something new will open up, which is a good encouraging word, but it doesn’t mean anything outside of Christ. There is no world to me outside of Christ. Our only hope is in the risen Lord. But because of him, our worlds may end, this burning of the house was like the end of a world, because anything we ever experienced in that house is gone other than in memory form. But it’s also a new beginning because Christ opens a new way. And interesting, as we were looking at the fire, I thought of something well after the fact, but in 2008 we had a building we were renting for a church before I was an Anglican.

Doug:

That church also burned and we lost a lot of books, and my friend lost a lot of books, both of us had combined our libraries, and after that fire our house church, it was a house church that was meeting in a building, but it couldn’t function normally, and later it would come back to life in a different form, but it felt like it was dying. And prior to that point, I was having about five or six retreats a year, that’s really what I wanted to do was retreat ministry, and so I loved leading retreats and I always was a dreamer, it wasn’t hard for me to dream outrageous dreams that most of the time were magic thinking that I thought somebody would just give us a thousand acres of land.

Doug:

So we started looking at this guy’s land that was a thousand acres I thought, yeah, we’ll come up with the 3 million you need. He would take us around and show us his property, and we became real good friends with the owner. Needless to say, we never got that land. But after that fire, I couldn’t dream anymore. I felt like that was closed off. In fact, even when I became an Anglican, when I was working for apostles, I always had the sense that I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop; something bad’s getting ready to happen any minute, I just don’t know what it is yet.

Doug:

So when we were sitting there watching the fire burn, I think I said it, but I’m not sure. Well now Kelly, you can build your dream house. And then it occurred to me, the Lord brought that back to us. He brought back the time to dream. So I’m looking for her to dream up a new house for us.

Doug:

Now this is another word I wrote down: witness. We’re just living our lives and going through this, but we are unaware that people are watching and people responded to us because why did they, oh, maybe because I wrote a little meditation online or something. Cause people were like I can’t believe what the Lord was speaking, and then we were a witness to her family because friends from everywhere, from our church here, from every job I’ve ever had and I’ve had many, churches, different churches, vineyard, all kinds of churches.

Doug:

It’s like the one pastor praying for you. They came out from everywhere. To me, that was a witness of God’s family. And so it’s a witness to the community and it just stood out to me that much of life we’re just living, but actually there’s a hidden witness going on, but we’re usually not aware of it, and so this time we were aware of it because of all the friends that and strangers that reacted.

Kelly:

And the company that I work for, I work for covenant health, we’re a large organization and the day of the fire, my sister’s making calls to get all Doug’s medicine back.

Kelly:

And then he also used a CPAP machine to sleep, and all of those are on the backboard since COVID, we called his sleep center and they couldn’t help us, and so I called the manager of one of our sleep centers at one of our hospitals, and by four o’clock Monday afternoon, we had all his medicine back at no charge, one company said our we care fund just covered this, and we had a new CPAP machine, he likes better than the one he had before.

Doug:

Two more short things in the midst of this we’ve laughed a bunch this week. That’s the gift of the Lord is the ability to laugh. We didn’t spend the week really sad. I felt like we laughed a lot. And so the last thing I wrote on here was gift, which Kelly already said, but this is kind of funny, the things that we gave away prior to the fire are the only things that survived the fire. So we gave away a recliner to my friend in Nashville in July. And he said, I need to bring you that recliner back and it can be the memory chair, but it survived. And so I thought this is a biblical pattern, the things we give away are the only things that survive. So Jesus says in Matthew, whoever would save his life will lose it.

Doug:

But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. And I think we usually think of Jesus tells us to embrace the cross or, follow him and you must take up your cross and follow me. We in the American Christian form, at least, we have interpreted that to mean a discipline of my flesh, because Paul does talk about his flesh when he was crucified, but a discipline of not sinning or something. But in a sense, if we look at what, the way of the cross works in the life of Christ and his followers, it’s really about pouring my life out for other people, that’s what losing my life means, I don’t have to protect my ego, my reputation, my anything I can pour out my time, my life, my dreams, my love. I don’t have to protect any of this, I can pour it all out.

Doug:

In fact, that’s the only way I’m ever going to live. And in a way that’s the call of Christ to us. It’s to pour out our lives for one another. All Paul’s expectations, whether it be in Romans or Corinthians or Philippians, it’s always about pouring out our lives for one another about submitting one to another, humbling myself for one another, giving my gifts to one another, and that’s what survives the fire. And Paul actually even talks about our gifts will pass through the fire and some will be burned up, and then some will be like precious metals and precious stones, and that’s the things that we give away, it’s the life that we give away is what is preserved. And so our own life comes back to us through the love of others. So we pour our lives out and this is in a way what we’ve experienced this week, which many people don’t always experience, but we’ve experienced the love of the community.

Doug:

People calling us encouraging us. So if we had been completely alone all week, I think we would’ve had a different week, but we were surrounded by love that people were pouring into us. So I would encourage all of us. I mean, that’s the way of the gospel, and so I think that’s what I would hope for this community. Me always, what makes a community real is not giant buildings or hundreds and hundreds of people, it is a community that grows up in love, cause that’s what we’re made to do. So I pray that might be our testimony among us. So we’ll pause here. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for this community and the love that we’ve experienced here. Thank you that you have surrounded us and thank you…