The Grace of God in Time of Trouble: Deana Benninger
February 25, 2008
On January 31, 2008, I found out the hard way that the Lord is always with us whether we notice it not! I wasn’t home at the time everyone in my subdivision was evacuated due to a fire. By the time we got to the entry of our subdivision, we could see numerous flaming areas of grass in the lot on our corner with some flames being 10 feet high and spreading
faster than you could blink. The scary thing is that our house wasn’t far from that grassy lot; only a few fences and a yard separated the flames from our home!
The police blocked off the entry and wouldn’t let me get our dog Bella out of our house no matter how much I pleaded with the officer. He said,
“Pets are insignificant and they don’t matter!” That really upset me, because for us Bella is a family member and our dog child. And yes, she is
just a dog, but she is irreplaceable just as any human is. I know he was just doing his job, but I was already beside myself at this point and his
words only made me feel worse about the situation and somehow I felt I was betraying Bella. I second-guessed all the decisions I had made earlier
that day and wondered if I had done this or that if I would have been home at the time and could have gotten her to safety.
My first call was to get Josh by my side, and the next was to call Father Chip to get him praying for a good outcome for the situation. I figured if I
got enough people praying maybe God would hear us and spare our home and Bella. I didn’t care about our home during the chaos since that’s what insurance is for. Sure it would have been an inconvenience to be out of a home and all our things gone, but they could be replaced…not
Bella!
Josh was able to meet my mom and me where we were stationed at a small shopping strip adjacent to our subdivision. But all we could do was stand and watch and wonder for nearly three and a half hours. We spoke with others who lived in our neighborhood while we were watching the fire department try to put out the flames. But some of the stories had our minds working overtime with what if’s. It was excruciating not knowing if our house was on fire or if our dog was alive or dead, especially since we keep her crated when we are not home. An odd coincidence is not more than a few weeks earlier we had ADT come out and install a wired smoke detector so she would be more protected if something happened when we were not home. I called them and they assured me that no alarms were going off inside our home. So that put me at ease for a little bit, but when I was looking at flames so close to our home, little could calm me down.
By the time they let us walk back into our subdivision, we could see some homes had their yards and fences totally torched back to front. There
was probably smoke damage to detached garages and homes closer to the flames. To my knowledge, no one’s home was completely destroyed.
Some people’s pets that were outside did suffer from smoke inhalation, though I’m not sure if any were really hurt or died. However, looking at one person’s home, it looked so bad it seemed that the dogs in the backyard would have died!
When we got back to our house, I grabbed Bella and Josh looked out the back door. He saw that more than 50% of our backyard was scorched, and there was about the same amount of damage to our back and side fence. The fire department had knocked down a section of our fence to fight the fire and used our water hose to help keep it from starting back up. We had to leave again, and it was nearly two hours later that everyone was allowed back for good. At that point we could see truly how lucky everyone was.
One neighbor’s yard was a total loss, but the neighbor on the other side wasn’t even touched! We were very lucky that it didn’t hit the house,
although one part of the fire in the back yard came six inches from the back of our home. On the other side of the yard, the burned grass didn’t
come as close and that was the area where Bella was closest. But seeing the path the fire took convinced me it could have only been God that
spared the area near where Bella was kept in our bedroom on the back wall.
The thing that made it so bad that day was that the winds were reported anywhere from 25-55 mph. The news said that a power line snapped nearby. When it hit the ground, it caused a spark and as dry as it was in that field, it seemed like less than five minutes before the whole thing lit up. The news said 20-30 acres were burned just in this little area. Luckily we had about 23 fire units respond very quickly, and I think that is what saved everyone’s homes from going up in flames. By the time the fire department had one patch out, it would start back up. Our area wasn’t the only fire in the city at the time so we were lucky to have as many units as we did. This ordeal showed me how truly amazing God
is. He was definitely there when we needed Him! Looking at the home directly behind us, we can see that their grass and fence were damaged,
but the fire went all the way around the house without touching it. To me that was a miracle if there ever was one!
Lately I’ve been having a spiritual battle, I have been so consumed with getting pregnant, even more after miscarrying back in early August. I feel that we have a short window of opportunity to have a baby before Josh gets deployed somewhere. I felt with all the bad things that have happened in my life that somehow God owed me one and I wanted to cash in with a child. As a kid I was forced to attend church while living in
Ft. Worth and came to actually despise all things religion—the kind of church I went to can do that to you. Also, seeing what happened at the church my grandmother attended with the rolling of the eyes and the snakes turned me off and made me think how phony this all must be!
And then along comes Josh, a man with a calling for playing the pipe organ. And where do you find pipe organs … churches. I thought, great.
Josh grew up Catholic and had an extensive background in the Episcopal Church. When we found All Saints, it was pretty easy for him. Me … I was so terrified that I avoided Communion because I didn’t know what to do until Father Chip taught me.
All Saints became a family—so much so that Josh and I were married there. When Josh felt that he needed to further his musical talents and
move on to Christ Episcopal, I wasn’t pleased at first. I felt that I was just getting comfortable with this entire Anglican liturgy, and I was forced to go to a place where things were different from what I had just learned. I was so involved with various ministries at All Saints that I felt I
was short staffing people and that we were going to be written off and not allowed back.
Since September we’ve been embraced by the congregation at Christ Church and, thankfully, still accepted by our family at All Saints. It is
very hard to make the choice which church to attend each Sunday. I am in the middle, so to speak, between wanting to support my husband and wanting to be somewhere that is more comfortable and nonjudgmental.
The night of the fire, I was up till nearly 2 a.m. I couldn’t rest my mind and couldn’t stop coughing from all the smoke I had inhaled on top of the illness I already was battling. But each time I looked at something in our home—whether it was my husband or our dog or some stupid knickknack we had—I was brought to tears realizing how truly lucky we were. Josh
seems to think that the winds played a part in the flames taking the path they did, but I don’t think so. It was God; it had to be! When my faith was at its lowest point, He came to make me believe again and put me back on the right path in my mind and heart.
A few months ago, I was sitting in the pews at Christ Church waiting for the service to begin when I had a thought to change what I wanted to
use as a middle name for our first girl. I had always loved the name Emily and chose Rene as the middle name long before Josh and I ever met. But by some overwhelming force, the name Grace popped into my head, and when I said Emily Grace out loud it seemed like it was meant to be. Well, we will have to wait for Emily Grace to enter our world, but I definitely believe in the Grace of God and that He was present that windy day.
Deana Benninger
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