Living in a House on Fire

We all live in a house on fire. No fire department to call. No way out. Just an upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns through the house… with us trapped, locked in. So we sit there on our wire framed bed, staring out the window watching our world go by without us. See kids play on the street, families eat dinner and say grace, young adults graduate from universities, fall in love, live their lives. And we’re just watching as the flames dance around us. We can see it, but we can’t feel it, none of it. The fire is going to take us soon. The smoke is getting thicker, the foundation's crumbling, walls collapsing. We breathe in air and cough out ash. We are trapped, but the door’s wide open. We’re not chained to the bed, yet we can't walk the four paces to safety. The phone is right next to us, connected and waiting, yet we can’t push just three little buttons to call for help. So we don’t use the phone, but simply yelling out two words we’ve know since we first learned to talk, “help me,” seems impossible. But maybe just one thing, only one thing is all we’re capable of, so we do just that one thing. We remove the one-way glass of the window we put up to protect ourselves from the outside and let people see in, see us. See the tear tracks running down our face, the brokenness, the battered self we hide away, passed the smile and perfected facade. They are able to yell those two words for us, dial those three numbers, walk those four paces. Next thing we know, we’re on the other side of the street, watching as firefighters work to quench the flames. It doesn’t happen right away, that’s not possible, but eventually, the fire is out and we are not only back in our house but our restored home, able to find and recover treasures to use we thought lost forever. We never put that one-way glass back up, so we are not alone, we are never alone, we wouldn’t survive otherwise. Alone the easiest things are the most difficult tasks of all. Letting people in is the hardest task in the world, to show people we’re suffering seems impossible. But when we do that we escape the unrelenting fire trying to consume us.