Saving Lives

I love my firefighters.  They are young, bulletproof, courageous, irreverent, and sometimes willing to take risks they shouldn’t, which is why there are captains, spouses and, of course, chaplains.  Last night my guys tried to fight a fire in two adjacent old RVs in which people lived.  Three of the residents died.  The majority of firefighters in our town are also paramedics, and the others are all EMTs.  For them, life is all about saving lives, not losing them.  Under the worst of conditions they will do everything possible, and sometimes more than that, to bring someone back from the brink of an untimely death.  It troubles me to be so far away from them right now as we continue our vacation in Hawaii.  The most I could do was to send a note of prayer reminding them that the saving work of God is done mostly through human hands, and never more than through the hearts and hands of firefighters.  Sometimes that saving work is beyond what we can do, but what is not possible for us is always possible for God in his time and space that is not ours to comprehend.