The first thing to do when faced with a situation racing wildly out of control, such as a massive wildfire roaring down a canyon road toward you, is to evacuate. You can drop everything that isn’t alive and regroup later.

My son Eric is the youth pastor of Malibu Presbyterian, the church that was one of the first things to go up in flames last Sunday morning in Southern California. There were only a few people getting the church ready for the morning service. The pastor and his team had been warned of a wildfire in the area, so he was gathering computers and files just in case. At first the fire seemed out of range. But an hour or so before the service would have started, firefighters raced over to let them know the church would have to evacuate, drop everything, just run.

That morning, Eric would have been in church getting the youth room ready, but he happened to be out of town — in San Diego, where he got the news. He drove north, as more wildfires from San Diego up to Malibu were flaring and tearing through forests along the way.

The road through Malibu was closed, power was out, and flames had run west to the ocean, burning down a few multi-million-dollar beach homes and the church along the way. Fires were still raging out of control, forcing more evacuations around Malibu.

But by the next day, Eric and the other pastoral leaders had regrouped. They had each come up with a priority list, from which they made an agenda for getting the church rebuilt. Various groups in Malibu had called to offer their spaces for church meeting rooms. Malibu Presbyterian decided to accept an amazing offer when the local synagogue said, hey, we’re not using our space Sunday mornings.

On Tuesday, Eric noted a friendliness creeping into Malibu restaurants. When the waitress at one place found out the burned out church down the road was Eric’s — and not only his church but his workplace and the place where he corrals youth groups 3 times a week — she brought him a free dessert, quoting the movie Millions with a British accent: “Here kid, have all you want.”

Wednesday, Eric saw the church for the first time, a black hulk like a shipwreck. There was a hole, he said, where the youth room used to be. Eric and others helped paw through blackened wreckage that was the pastor’s office, trying to find the silver chalice the pastor’s father had given him; nobody could find it. “The good thing is,” said Eric, “everybody was safe. Nobody was hurt.”

Oregon has a lot of things going for it, but like those in other parts of the country, we seem to be unprepared for disaster. We try to be. Most of us keep a jar of peanut butter, canned food, matches, flashlight and sleeping bag around the house, but not all in one box. And what good does it do to have a nicely prepared box if we’re told to drop everything and run for the hills? We’d like to know what the disaster is, so we can make plans. But we can’t know, which makes it more frightening to contemplate, so we do nothing, waiting for who knows what.

It might be better to contemplate now, rather than during an emergency, to sit and think about the most important things: what to keep, what to toss. If the things we want to keep can’t be stored in a box, all the better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 7:49 am and is filed under Disaster Preparedness, Faith and Politics, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.