Packing Light: When Fires Threatened Our Home

Just over a week ago, I stepped out into the living room after putting my fourth son to bed for the night and was immediately struck by the pungent smell of smoke. I searched the house and then opened the slider to the backyard which overlooks a canyon and majestic mountains. The air was filled with so much smoke that I couldn’t see beyond just a few feet. 

I turned on the news to hear reports of a rapidly growing fire on the mountain behind our home. Winds were picking up speed and in a moment of clarity, I asked my husband,Guy, to get our suitcases, just in case. As I watched the news, I began to organize the laundry on our coach that I had dumped there a few hours earlier. Having never evacuated my home before, I decided I better prepare, just in case. 

I took the piles of clean clothes and piled them into our suitcases. Next, I grabbed baby books and our wedding pictures. Guy grabbed our portable file cabinets with important documents. Within minutes, the reports on TV turned grim. We watched buildings burn just a stone’s throw from our home and burning embers could come our way at any moment. The hills around our home burst into flames as we woke the boys and urgently told them to grab their backpacks and a favorite stuffed animal and get in the car. They were terrified!

After driving several miles from our home and landing in a parking lot to regroup, we were able to find a hotel with enough beds for all six of us. We drove a half hour away and wearily collapsed in our tiny room. For three days, we watched the news and tried to make the most of a dramatic situation. The boys had a lot of questions and fears, but there were light moments too--like when we discovered that Oakley had 6 pairs of pants in his suitcase and only one shirt but Quinn had six shirts and only one pair of pants. Or the fact that when we looked in the toiletry bag, there were toothbrushes for only three of us! Three days later, we returned home, grateful it was still standing and ready to clean the ash and smoke damage from our home. 

It’s moments like these that bring clarity to our lives. I realized that when your life is threatened, you don’t worry too much about how many complete outfits you have packed. You mostly focus on essentials. You pack light.

When fires threatened our home, packing light was critical. The short journey from imminent danger to safety wasn’t bogged down by worrying about what everyone else was doing. It’s a good analogy for the pressures of motherhood in a world of comparison, too!

My friend Laura Ellis understands this. Recently, she wrote a book called, Packing Light: For the Journey of Motherhood. As a mom of seven, she longs to help women who are burdened and overwhelmed by the impossible standards that legalism in motherhood often weighs us down with. She encourages moms to “pack light” and find freedom from the opinions and personal convictions of others and instead, follow God’s gentle leading. 

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from Packing Light: 

“My friend Paige often prays that she would be ‘alert, attentive, and available.’ I love this, and remind my girls of theses three words when they go to babysit somewhere. This is how we are to be as servants of the Lord: alert to His voice, attentive to His leading, and available to do whatever He calls us to.”

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Manners can be very good ways to apply this command to love, but they are not moral laws. Manners are social rules that can vary from time period to time period, culture to culture, family to family, person to person, and even situation to situation.”

“‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’  was said by Benjamin Franklin--it is not Scripture. We need to be careful not to elevate a clean house to a level that God never intended it to be. (To be clear, too much cleaning for one mom might be just right for another.)” 

“I don’t scrapbook. I think it is a really nice way to preserve memories, but it just isn’t something I have ever felt led to do. I don’t even put together photo albums anymore, so I hung up some of those cloth covered boards with the ribbons stretched across them to tuck photos into. It is such an easy inexpensive way to display our pictures.”

Laura Ellis’s book is full of practical insights rooted in Scripture. I breathed a sigh of relief as I read her words, thankful that someone understood the pressures of motherhood and gave me permission to listen to God’s leading in my life and not the pressures I feel from Instagram feeds or the totally put together mom at my MOPS group. She understands how often we heap standards onto our families that God never intended and offers much needed encouragement when we feel weary in our roles as moms.

I admit, I still have a bag from our evacuation that I have not unpacked yet. It sits in the hallway, a reminder of our harrowing experience and a reminder that so many of the things we think we need are not all that important after all. When the fires spread quickly, we didn’t worry about all the things we knew we could replace. We focused on what was most precious to us. May we do so in our everyday parenting lives as well, removing unnecessary standards that our culture tried to laden us with. Just as Laura Ellis writes, packing light isn’t just good for fire evacuations--it’s good for our journey in motherhood, too. 

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YOUR TURN! What’s one of the outside pressures you have felt as a mom that isn’t necessarily something that God is putting pressure on you to do? How do you find freedom in your parenting choices? And don’t forget to get your own copy of Laura Ellis’s book. I know it will bless you!