Ah,
Thanksgiving Day 2017 at the Vaughan house.
And what a full day it was. It began
like many other Thursdays. Rising early. Quiet time with God. Read the paper. Munch on fruit. And frantically type out a blog post. Wait. Why
frantic all of a sudden? Has that become
my attitude and approach to this whole communicate with my 20 or 30 regular
readers? Well, not usually, I guess. But frantic was a pretty good word for
yesterday. As I recall it ended up being
a rather fractured piece of work. Sorry
about that, but fractured is just sometimes a good word for our life around
here. Frantic fractured.
Any
why so? I left the house around 7 a.m.
to begin my holiday trek to the six fire stations in town. Chris helped me load up an ice chest with
turkeys, and I was off, headed West. My
first stop was Pirates Beach. They were
preparing a scrumptious smelling breakfast.
I was invited to stay, but sadly my fruit and frozen waffles had
sufficiently filled me up. I prayed for the
guys there and headed on to Sea Isle for my next stop. Those guys also had some breakfast cooking. Well, bacon.
I guess there might have been something else, but who can smell anything
else when there is bacon? They were
watching one of the Home Alone movies.
Classics, for sure. Prayed with them, too.
From there
I headed East. Way East, out to right
near UTMB for a visit to station two. I
have no idea what those guys were watching when I arrived. They paused it immediately (either didn’t want me to catch them or they
were consummately polite. I’m pretty
sure it was the latter). One of them
did make an effort to summarize the contents of the show for me. Fascinating commentary. All made up for sure, but fascinating. I think he’d still be explaining that “training
video” if he hadn’t received a call from a chief. They joined me for prayer before I left.
As I headed
back West toward home my next stop was Central, the downtown station. And for a holiday morning in between calls, that
place was a flurry of activity. Several of
the guys were outside in the sunshine.
Not catching a tan, though. They were
basking in the sun’s warmth (It gets cold
inside that station when it’s cold outside). I prayed with that batch of guys and headed
upstairs to say hi to anyone else I might run into. And up there I found not just the rest of the
crew, but also an entire EMS crew. Some were
in the recliners, some were gathered around the table. It was good to touch base with the medical
guys, too.
Next stop
was station five, on Broadway by the Justice Center. They were already hard at work preparing
their noon meal. Well, I guess one of
them might have been working hard.
Another was relaxing in his chair and occasionally stirring the contents
of a big pan. Hey, somebody has to do
it, right? Those guys were watching the Macy’s
parade. Guess that makes them
classy? They were OK with tearing their
eyes away from the dragon balloon to pray with me, though.
My final
stop was station four, at the airport. That’s
the one closest to our house, so we have to take care of those guys. After all, they are the ones who take care of
us. Oh, and did I mention that Nathan was
on shift yesterday? That’s his station
now, so I got to see him. And of course
he was elbow deep in preparing for dinner there already. I watched him slice one of those big hams and
then cover it with brown sugar and cinnamon.
And I mean cover it. He was
pouring mounds of sugary brown. That
surely made some serious glaze. One of
the guys there mentioned that he had never tried fried turkey before. After brief discussion, Nathan grabbed the bag
I brought and offered him a slice. That bag
was no sooner opened than everyone in that station was on the spot, reaching
for a sample. “We were just waiting for
someone to be the first to open it.”
After I finished my cup of coffee, we prayed together and I bid them Happy
Thanksgiving.
Just have
to say that I am really proud of those guys.
Some of them got to see their families later in the day when the feasts
were all prepared. The department is
really good about allowing families to come to the stations on occasions like
this. Some guys were there to work so
that others on shift could take an hour or two and run to their own homes and
have a meal with their family there. Others
wouldn’t see family until they got off shift the next day. Appreciate your first responders, my friends. The sacrifices they make include more than
just running into burning buildings.
Psalms
5:3 says, “In the morning, O Lord, you
hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.”
Father
thank you for the care provided by first responders. Bless them on their working holidays. And watch over their families. Amen.
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