A year after I moved into the basement apartment I rent in Chevy Chase, I set off the fire alarm.
I assure you that this was not because I don’t know how to cook, or because I lack common sense about the use of a kitchen fan. Rather, I was frying breadfruit (see, now you’re starting to understand) and even though the whir of the fan over the stovetop was blaring and the door to my apartment has been swung open in a generous arc, the smoke produced from the frying was simply too much for my tiny abode.
When the fire alarm started beeping, I hopped around beneath it, furiously waving a kitchen towel in a vain attempt to beg submission. Before I could will the alarm to cease beeping, however, the security alarm on the house was triggered. I froze in panic. My landlady was not home and the house alarm had never gone off in the time I was living there. I called my landlady’s cell phone. No answer. I called the alarm company, prepared to offer the password. I got the answering machine. Within a few minutes, however, the alarm had stopped and the neighbors had hopefully stopped positioning themselves to attack an invisible intruder. Just when I thought the worst was over, the fire department was knocking on the front door.
Regaling my landlady with this turn of events was not something I was looking forward to. When she returned home later that day, her reaction was exactly what I thought it would be: anger and false accusations. She’s very easily agitated and knowing that the fire department had arrived and worse, that the neighbors in our upscale neighborhood had seen them (the horror!), she was livid at her obviously incompetent tenant.
After the fire alarm event, I limited the amount of cooking I did in my apartment. I cautiously heated pots at the minimum level needed and almost always had both a kitchen fan and oscillating fan to reduce the smoke of cooking. Even though what happened was unintentional, the fear of what might happen again (and what my landlady would do!) crippled me into abandoning my Susie Homemaker ways.
This week, as I’ve been dealing with some personal struggles, I have realized that in my Christian walk, I often react the same way that I did to the fire alarm. Even though everything turns out just fine, I always fixate on the worst of the experience. I consciously know that trials are opportunities for character building, but sometimes it’s so hard to become frozen in fear when dealing with them.
2 Timothy 1:7 reminds us, though, that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self discipline.” Whatever you may be dealing with this week, remember that there’s nothing to fear. Romans 8:37-39 says that nothing can separate us from God’s love. He always has our best interest at heart and no matter what happens, He’s still in charge.
