Somebody Call 911

When we first got to El Shaddai we noticed that
1. It’s really windy on top of the mountain and
2. There are constantly wildfires around us.

 

 

Imagine this:
You’re taking a nap after church one Sunday, and all of the sudden someone comes running into the room yelling to get up and grab your stuff because there’s a fire coming…

 

Yeah, I didn’t really like waking up that way either.

 

But, that’s exactly what happened to us.
So there are 5 girls in one room trying to stuff whatever we can into our backpacks, seeing the flames coming up towards the window and running out the door into tons of smoke. All of us were dropping things along the way, because from our vantage point it looked like the fire was right on our tails. We all ran up to the chapel where some other people were doing crafts with the kids, and then we realized that the fire was coming up towards the chapel.

By this time I’m pretty much in panic mode and praying for God to stop the flames, and the other girls are trying to figure out if we need to get out of the chapel with the kids. So we were getting loud and then finally we ran through some more smoke into the baby house.
After all of that we found out that the fire stopped right before it could get into any of our rooms and before it could get to the chapel so we were all safe and none of our stuff was ruined! Praise God!

Some people ended up going to beat out the fire with tree branches or buckets of water around different parts of El Shaddai- did I mention that most of us were still in our “Sunday best”? It was pretty funny. 🙂

 

A couple of nights before all of this happened, there had been another fire that got really close, but the fire breaks around the property stopped it from coming closer. People still had to go out to certain parts and fight the fire off, but for the most part everything was good.
The wind had picked up so much on Sunday, though, that the fire jumped right over the nice green fire break area. Cool.

 

Even though that was one of the scariest moments on the Race, or even in my life, it’s also one of my favorite memories now.
Being in a situation like that can really test you. And even though there was a moment of panic, I really did feel the Lord’s peace and I just knew that everything would be fine. Even if all of our stuff had been burned up, we were all safe, and that was amazing!