“A Fire’s Perspective” (offering from a Bridges attendee)
This is what I feel like! …and I feel this way because I do not have the money to replenish what I have lost -- the "stuff" that we had accumulated that made our everyday living more easily doable. After the fire, when someone would ask "what do you need?" I would be at an utterly complete loss as to what to say because what I needed was to be able to afford to replace all my life’s conveniences...the clothing I loved, the kitchenware and houseware that I had searched for years to find that met the needs.
I had never put into descriptive words for my kitchen and household (other than function and being pretty), and I loved handling and seeing it. I needed the bathroom items and arrangement that I had gotten set up for our home so we were not wanting for body care that suddenly surfaced with a need to be cared for. I needed my personal "stuff" like Bibles, journals, books, movies, music that brought me connection to GOD, myself and my family. Those are the things that held my personal history of just who I was, who we were and where we had come from.
"What do you need?" In the face of having nothing but the barest of essentials (rushed clothes on their back), "What do you need?" is an utterly ridiculous question to ask of someone standing there devoid of absolutely everything that defined the framework of who they are.
This is why people do not know how to deal with the poor, the widows, and the orphans. They do not understand this feeling! Shoot! I didn’t understand this feeling myself until I was walking through it these last 2 years! I didn't understand that I was even so tied to my “stuff”! I knew I was collecting the “stuff” to make life easier as I grew older when money would be tighter, but I never dreamed the loss of it all would cause this kind of mental disorientation and blank staring at people asking this kind of clarity of me.
Having just gone through the crazy fire day this past March 14, 2025, and seeing the couple of people we knew lost their entire homes, and then the super-rich people in Stillwater that lost entire homes and all of them seemingly bouncing right back to normal. They were rebuilding their houses, properties and lives WITHOUT showing up to hand-out places (for the needed).
GOD has put all of these floating pieces together for me so that I now understand what has been staring at me as a jumbled mess for these last 2 years... People in the churches do not know how to deal with the poor, the widows, and the orphans. They don’t know because they do not truly have an understanding of what these groups need. They don't need laundry soap and paper towels and toilet paper and 10 toothbrushes. They don't need clothing that you GUESS will fit them. ...and tons of it. They need to be able to talk about what they've lost and who they are and how those things are tied together and then you meet THAT need.
They NEED to be able to capture or recapture who they are. They need to feel capable of taking care of themselves. They need to feel useful/beneficial to others around them. These are the things that I have needed these past 2 years, and I have felt completely incapable of being useful since I have none of my "stuff" supplies to pull from, to assist anyone. I need to see/remember who I am. We're too poor. We are scraping by month to month, for me to instantly replace things that make me feel like myself again. So what benefit am I to anyone when I don’t even feel like myself anymore? I am now among the poor. …and rather incapable of restocking my supply of things to return to being beneficial to anyone that needs help, AND I have lost so much of who I am in my own eyes as I look in the mirror.
We are doing well to just survive month to month in our SO SLOWLY rebuilding of a home.
I KNOW that YAH has a purpose in all of this, and I honestly can see HIS purpose in all of it, so whining is not my point. Maybe putting this into words is all that I needed out of what I have seen these last couple of days so that I understand those I am seeking to help.