Job in LA, ash in the Whirlwind

I can’t stop reading the news, and updates from friends and family about the catastrophic inferno in LA.

By now, I know close to 100 people who have lost their homes or have had their families lose their homes, and even more evacuated into the unknown.

And still, the fires rage through my hometown, devouring everything in their path—palm trees igniting like matchsticks, homes crumbling into ash, dreams scattering on the winds.

Of course It feels biblical — even apocalyptic —, this blaze, as though we’ve been thrust into an ancient text where suffering is vast and answers are fleeting.

I think of Job, sitting among the ruins of his life, scraping his sores with broken pottery, the smoke of his grief rising to meet the sky. Job, who lost everything in the span of moments, without warning or reason. Job, who demanded answers from the whirlwind and was met with silence so profound it became a voice.

And here we are, our city burning, the sky choked with ash, the smell of destruction so thick you can taste it. LA stands in the ruins of what was, asking the same questions Job once asked: Why? Why this fire, this loss, this pain?

We look for reasons in weather patterns and droughts, in the winds and the negligence, but no answer feels sufficient.

The fire takes without mercy. It doesn’t discriminate between the guilty and the innocent, between the mansions and small homes. It burns with the kind of indifference that leaves you hollow, searching for meaning in the smoke.

Job’s friends, if they were here, might say this is punishment, a reckoning for something we’ve done. They might tell us to look inward, to repent, to rebuild better. But Job knew better. Job knew that sometimes suffering comes without explanation, that the fire doesn’t need a reason to burn.

And yet, Job didn’t stop asking. He railed against the silence, against the injustice of it all. He cried out to the whirlwind, demanding to be seen, to be heard. And in the end, when God finally spoke, there were no answers—just more questions. But there was also presence. A reminder that even in the midst of destruction, we are not alone.

The fires rage, and still, people fight. Firefighters stand against walls of flame, people open their homes to strangers, and communities rise from the ashes with a stubborn kind of hope. It’s not enough to make sense of the suffering, but it’s something. It’s the same stubbornness that kept Job alive, even when he had every reason to give up.

Perhaps that’s what faith looks like: not answers, but the courage to stand in the ash and say, I am still here. To sit with the unanswerable and still demand meaning. To look at the ruins and begin to rebuild, knowing full well that the fires might come again.

The whirlwind doesn’t always answer, but maybe it doesn’t have to.

Maybe the act of asking is enough. And maybe, just maybe, the ash that falls will one day become the soil where something new takes root.