I woke up this morning in a small town northeast of San Diego nestled in the foothills of the Cuyamaca Mountains called Ramona. The window in my bedroom looks across to a hillside of beautiful homes cascading down the mountain. You cannot look at this scene after the wildfires that are still terrorizing southern California without thinking what high winds and a spark could do to that hillside. California has so many beautiful hills and mountains like these that offer a sense of seclusion and countless “rooms with a view,” and yet they come with a risk. It makes me feel a little unsafe here except that today, not a leaf is moving it is so still.

I am here attending an informal get-together of brothers involving those who have been in some kind of professional ministry most of their lives. These “meetings without an agenda” are the mastermind of a friend and former pastor, John Coulombe, who has always had a vision for getting people together for encouragement and prayer, and once you attend one of these your realize we are much too busy not to do more of this.

Given the fact that my time is limited today to write a Catch, I am bringing to mind something I wrote after the Maui fires that might shed some light on the tragic events of the last couple weeks here in southern California.

1. How insignificant we are against natural disasters, and how much we must depend on the Lord. Storms have always been euphemisms for the power of God. That power benefits us, but can also harm us. Why He brings us harm is not always easy to grasp, but the end result is to get us to a place of submission to His perfect will, whatever that might be. It’s from the Book of Job in the Bible — the story of a man who lost everything — that we receive statements such as: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” This is a statement not of resignation, but of spiritual maturity.

1. How much we need each other. Natural disasters always throw us together as human beings and shake us up to where we are forced to rely on friends and even strangers. Some meet neighbors for the first time. There will be many new friends created by long hours trapped in a shelter or the lobby of a hotel. Like Glen Sinatra, who in the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Estero, Florida, met, for the first time, the hospice nurse who had held his wife’s hand as she died.

1. And finally, we find out what’s really important, and what’s important are human life and relationships. Families who have lost everything in a fire cling to each other more in the realization that in spite of their loss, they are safe, and they still have each other, and as hard as it might be, they will start over. Material possessions can be replaced and will eventually all burn up anyway; relationships with God and each other are eternal.