Faith on View

California Fires: Finding Beauty in the Animal Evacuations

Horses with heads sticking out of their stalls.

Something Unexpected

There were two weeks in October that didn’t go as I expected.

On Monday, October 9th, my wife was following the developing Northern California fires online when she saw that they were woefully shorthanded at the large animal evacuation site near us. We decided to spend a few hours the next morning volunteering. Those few hours turned into much more.

Soon after arriving to volunteer, we were assigned to watch a barn and help care for the animals, mostly horses. The instructions to volunteers were that the horses needed water, walking, and food. But, there were a ton of volunteers and the waters were getting checked every 10 minutes and people with little horse experience were walking them. At one point, our barn had seven animals and 12 people trying to help. Everyone meant well but it was stressing the animals out. Then when a horse got stressed four people would try to calm it… which didn’t help.

American flag waving in the wind with the sun shining through it.

Dear Lord, patient and forgiving Father, all-knowing God who sees our hearts even as we can’t, I pray for our country even as the inauguration of our 45th president, Donald Trump, is taking place. I pray …

Painting of MLK Jr. putting his hand over Donald Trump's mouth and using his finger to shush Trump.

When I first started writing here at Faith on View, I wrote on the About page that one of my core values was transparency. I didn’t realize at the time that whether or not we …

It has been a hard week. I received some bad news about my Ph.D. program on Monday and then a few minutes after reading that email, I got an e-mail that my Ph.D. Advisor had …

When my wife shared my post Gun Violence: Perfect Love Drives out Fear on her Google+ a photographer friend, Shari Miller, felt compelled to share a poem she had written a few years ago after Sandy Hook. Shari …

Close up of petrified wood with moss on it at sunset.

Those who follow this blog, or at least used to, know that there has been, with one exception, no activity over the last year. One major reason, as I explained in my last blog post …

Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014 portrait

A little while back I had a fan of Faith on View message me on Facebook asking me to once again post regularly on Faith on View. Okay, truth be told it really was more of an internet friend teasing me for my failures. For those who follow this blog, they noticed that in September posts stopped fairly abruptly. What happened was that I had the wonderful opportunity to become a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts which is one of the top Art Schools in the nation. But, I had previously committed to teaching two classes at William Jessup University, an evangelical school in the Sacramento area, and a class at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I am pursuing my PhD. This meant that in addition to the Theological Aesthetics course I was auditing from the esteemed Frank Birch Brown, I was also now teaching five classes at three different institutions. All that to say I was really busy and I let my writing on Faith on View slip. The good news is that this semester my teaching is reduced and I am only teaching one course at GTU and one at CCA. This should translate into more regular writing from me. I have a lot of ideas so I am looking forward to having more time to get them on “paper.”

Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014 portrait taken by Nicole DiGiorgio of Sweetness and Light Photography — Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014. Portrait taken by Nicole DiGiorgio of Sweetness and Light Photography

Every year, when 9/11 arrives yet again, a whirl of emotions fill me and I begin to mentally prepare myself for the countless images of flaming towers and chaos. On September 11, 2001 I was watching the TV dumbfounded as events unfolded just a few miles away. When the last tower dropped, I was suddenly plunged into a world of silence as the TV reception and cell service failed simultaneously. I began the long wait to hear from my husband who was attending class in Brooklyn that morning. The semester had just begun and I wasn’t sure when his classes began… and he frequented the area surrounding the World Trade Center (WTC).

Seeing the photos of the towers burning also brings back the incredible stench them burning for a month and the heavily armored military presence in the city that appeared over night, on every bridge, in every subway station and seemingly on every street corner.

BUT

There always in a “but”, isn’t there?

I could have chosen a path of fear or anger, but instead, I choose hope. (It’s often a daily choice.) The profound effect on 9/11 on my life is very hard for me to articulate, almost impossible, but these photos help to show my perspective.

World Trade Center, NYC — World Trade Center, 1998

This is a great little video that I ran across on Twitter. It was shared by John Fea from Messiah College who was on the panel. The panel was at the Organization of American History …

Today the Town Talk ran an article about the issue of forged documents at Louisiana College which I reported on yesterday: “Documents: Former Louisiana College employee was paid to keep quiet” One thing in that …