By Jennifer Batchelor 
I don’t watch the news anymore. I haven’t in years, actually. It’s a strange thing for an information junkie like myself to admit. My journalism professors would surely be dismayed by my declaration, but it’s a form of self-preservation.
I can’t watch the world bleed out anymore.
I don’t watch, but I do read. I read the New York Times and the Washington Post. I read the clickbait and the longform journalism. I consume and consume, because I mistakenly believe that if I can just digest enough information, everything will make sense again.
I just need to understand how it all started, and then I’ll know how to fix it.
That’s the thing about fires though. Sometimes we never see how they start, because we don’t notice until they’re raging out of control. We always want to find the person who struck the first match, because he’s to blame, right? And if we can blame someone, then everything will make sense again.
Even as earth turns to ash and what was once beautiful is laid barren.
Some people ask why I read the news instead of watching it. The only way I know how to explain it is that it’s the difference between reading the book and watching the movie. In the book, my mind can draw the pictures and fill in the gaps. Heroes and villains don’t look so dissimilar on the page; there’s room for gray. Watching it unfold in full technicolor, the nuance is gone.
Last fall, when Gatlinburg burned because two boys were playing with matches, the smoke reached all the way to Nashville. The acrid smell stung my eyes and nostrils in my own backyard, more than 200 miles from where the fire raged. That’s the thing about wildfires, though. The smoke always travels farther than the flames—sometimes even hundreds of miles away, depending on how the wind blows.
It’s the smoke that makes it hard to breathe, hard to see. It’s the smoke that will kill you, before the flames ever get a chance.
They say fires are necessary, sometimes, to bring unruly undergrowth to heel. You hear about “controlled burns” of swaths of land, but I wonder, how do you control something like fire? How do you keep it from growing too big and destroying something you never meant for it to?
If you liked this, you'll love our book, SO GOD MADE A MOTHER available now!
Order NowCheck out our new Keepsake Companion Journal that pairs with our So God Made a Mother book!
Order Now
Her View Shop
by Crystal Fulmer He climbed into our bed last week, holding the teddy bear that came home in his twin brother’s hospital grief box almost 10 years earlier. “Mom, I really miss my brother. And do you see that picture of me over there with you, me and his picture in your belly? It makes me really, really sad when I look at it.” A week later, he was having a bad day and said, “I wish I could trade places with my brother.” No, he’s not disturbed or mentally ill. He’s a happy-go-lucky little boy who is grieving the brother who grew...
Your memory floats through my mind so often that I’m often seeing two moments at once. I see the one that happened in the past, and I see the one I now live each day. These two often compete in my mind for importance. I can see you in the play of all young children. Listening to their fun, I hear your laughter clearly though others around me do not. A smile might cross my face at the funny thing you said once upon a time that is just a memory now prompted by someone else’s young child. The world...
by Chelsea Ohlemiller She left this world with an endless faith while mine became broken and shattered. She taught me to believe in God’s love and his faithfulness. But in losing her, I couldn’t feel it so I believed it to be nonexistent. I felt alone in ways like I’d never known before. I felt helpless and hopeless. I felt like He had abandoned my mother and betrayed me by taking her too soon. He didn’t feel near the brokenhearted. He felt invisible and unreal. The day my mother died I felt alone and faithless while still clinging to her belief of heaven....
Everyone knows there is a time to be born and a time to die. We expect both of those unavoidable events in our lives, but we don’t expect them to come just 1342 days apart. For my baby daughter, cancer decided that the number of her days would be so many fewer than the hopeful expectation my heart held as her mama. I had dreams that began the moment the two pink lines faintly appeared on the early morning pregnancy test. I had hopes that grew with every sneak peek provided during my many routine ultrasounds. I had formed a...
by Amy Keyes We all have hard days at work. Those days that push our physical, mental, and emotional limits out of bounds and don’t play fair. 18 years ago, I walked into an OB/GYN emergency room feeling like something was off, just weeks away from greeting our first child. As I reflect on that day, which seems like a lifetime ago and also just yesterday, I find myself holding space for the way my journey catalyzed a series of impossibly hard days at work for some of the people who have some of the most important jobs in the world. RELATED: To...
by Carole Hawkins As your time on this earth came close to the end, I pondered if I had given you the best life. I pondered if more treatment would be beneficial or harmful. I pondered if you knew how much you were loved and cherished As the day to say goodbye grew closer, I thought about all the good times we had. I remembered how much you loved to travel. I remembered how many times you were there for me in my times of darkness. You would just lay right next to me on the days I could not get out of...
by Her View From Home Sister, we haven’t talked in a while. We both know the reason why. Yet again, you had a choice between your family and drugs, and you chose the latter. I want you to know I still don’t hate you. What I do hate is the drugs you always seem to go back to once things get too hard for you. RELATED: Love the Addict So Hard it Hurts Speaking of hard, I won’t sugarcoat the fact that being around you when you’re actively using is so hard. Your anger, your manipulation, and your deceit are too much for me (or anyone around you) to...
by Calleen Petersen In the 1940s, between my grandmother’s fourth child and my father, she experienced the premature birth of a baby. Family history doesn’t say how far along she was, just that my grandfather buried the baby in the basement of the house I would later grow up in. This was never something I heard my grandmother talk about, and it was a shock to most of us when we read her history. However, I think it’s indicative of what women for generations have done. We have buried our grief and not talked about the losses we have experienced in losing children through...
by Louisa Vilardi No one is really ever prepared for loss. Moreover, there is no tutorial on all that comes with it. Whether you’ve lost an earring, a job, a relationship, your mind, or a relative, there is one common truth to loss. Whatever you may have lost . . . is gone. While I was pregnant with my oldest son, my mother would rub my belly with her trembling hands and answer all my questions. She had all the answers, and I listened to every single one of them. This deviated from the norm in our relationship. My mother was a stern...
The last living memory I have of my best friend before she died was centered around a Scrabble board. One letter at a time, we searched for those seven letters that would bring us victory. Placing our last words to each other, tallying up points we didn’t know the meaning of at the time. Sharing laughter we didn’t know we’d never share again. Back in those days, we didn’t have Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever other things teenagers sneak onto their phones to capture the moments. So the memory is a bit hazy. Not because it was way...
