Fire

"A Destructive Burning"

This is my superficial definition of a fire, but as I think about it more, I don't like the word destructive in it. The word fire has so many meanings and most of them are negative. Fired from work or your house destroyed by fire. Those are the most common images that arise in my mind when I think of fire. But fire is not always destructive and when it is, the best always comes out of it. We have fires everyday in our lives that we must put out and learn to move past them. These fire actually positively affect our lives in the long run or at least we can make them.

I think of the only real fire in my life so far and that was my sophomore year of college when I was living in Arizona. I remember the phone call from my dad. He sounded so calm. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him (nothing important compared to what he was doing). He proceeded to say, "Well, I am standing outside mom's store and watching it burn." WHAT??? That was my response to my dad's passive remark. He proceeded to tell me that the store next door (which was part of the same building) was burning to the ground, and that they frantically had just pulled "the important" stuff from my mom's store before they had to evacuate. So they were just standing in the street watching. Hoping for the best; for the fire to not spread.

Luckily, my mom's store did not burn as the other store did. But the horrible smoke damage caused all the merchandise in her store to be ruined. We were tremendously fortunate and only had to close our doors for a week to re-merchandise and rid the smoke stench. It was a devastation to the community, but like all disasters some good will come from it with the work of individuals. My mom and her girls, designed, pieced and quilted three quilts. One remains in the store today as a remembrance of this day, one hangs in the Overland Park fire department and one was auctioned off to raise money for the fire department that worked so hard to save a downtown area.

Good can come from every fire. Our small daily fires that are so easy to put out but rarely are or our large fires that burn holes in our minds or in our hearts. I like to think that every night when I go to bed that I can put out my fire for the day and make it a positive experience. There will be a fire everyday that challenges what we do, how we act, and ultimately how we survive our lives. Why live to survive our lives when we can live to embrace the heat of the fire and make something of it?