You may have seen on the news that the Austin area is suffering from several terrible wildfires. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed. Our house is not in a location that would be likely to have a wildfire, so we are not at risk. But we know several people in the neighborhoods that have been evacuated, and we don’t know at this time if their houses are safe or not.
Our church is involved in a city-wide relief group that is taking donations for those displaced by the fires, so Hannah and I went to Target this afternoon and stocked up on underwear and baby food to take to the donation site tomorrow. (a great use for the baby food coupons I still get!)
There are hundreds of firefighters working around the clock, but with the dry and windy conditions, the battle has continued for several days now. Today I could see smoke along the horizon from the biggest fire – which is 30 miles away!
I tried to embed a video, but WordPress is not cooperating. So you’ll just have to click HERE to watch. This was shot yesterday and posted by Texas Parks and Wildlife. Shocking how fast and destructive it is.
grit & grace 
I think the gift I appreciated most after our house fire was that women from our church picked up clothes which had survived the fire but were full of water and soot. They lovingly washed these clothes and dried them on their clotheslines to air them out. What a blessing to have clean clothes to wear!