“The flames rose. So did our people.”
Instead of sleeping in on Saturday morning, Darcy Olsen and her four children woke to their attic on fire. Her people came to help.
Darcy founded the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, which makes sure that kids in foster care have legal representation. All too often, the child-welfare system is about adults; the children can be secondary concerns.
Darcy’s people are well-trained, having walked with her on her journey through fostering and adoption.
“You seem so calm,” Darcy recalls someone commenting that morning. She’ll admit now she wasn’t. “But if I wanted the kids to really believe that ‘things are just things,’ I had to hold it together,” she later reflected to social media friends.
In the wake of the fire, she’s been overwhelmed by gratitude for the response from neighbors, strangers and friends. “In an instant, an army of firefighters … stood before us, ready to risk their lives for strangers,” she remembers. “When I called to ask which station we could thank, I learned that men from four stations and two battalion chiefs had responded.”
Amid the chaos of the morning, her daughter’s cat was “too scared to breathe” and had to be rescued. And when her 8-year-old Michael volunteered to help, someone found a way to make him feel like a legitimate part of the rescue.
“Then came the volunteers from the American Red Cross, funded by people like you and me. I didn’t want to say yes. But we needed help.”
We all do at some point. Some times more obviously than others. Darcy couldn’t help but accept. Sometimes we do have to have the humility to ask.
One of the reasons her whole family situation works is because her church community is a real, active part of her life, as a support. She made sure they were aware, texting: “We’ve had a fire. I think I need some hands.” The response was immediate. “They came. One after another. After another. After another,” Darcy recalled.
She remembers now that “Some were dressed for the Easter pageant. Didn’t matter. They came as they were, with food, water, hugs and jokes. They salvaged. They shoveled. For hours. They searched for a tiny red elf named Candy because Michael was in tears that she’d been separated from her husband elf, Charlie. She mattered to him — so she mattered to them.”
She and her kids became overrun with food, which helped in more ways than one, since so many people were coming through helping. A friend found a place for them to stay, complete with a pool for the children. Someone lined up “chef-prepared dinners for the week” — “we’re suddenly very fancy,” Darcy jokes. One mom insisted that she’d “love to help with laundry!” and another with soccer duty “practices, games, carpools. However long you need.”
Later on the day of the fire, she had her breakdown moment, crying on the phone with her father, who lives on the East Coast. Stress is stress. She was also overwhelmed by the love she and the children were being shown. As she says: “We don’t have a house right now. But we have a mansion. Not made of walls — but of people.”
When the fires rise, will we rise? Easter and Passover. Weddings and funerals. Births and graduations. We have many rituals that have religious connotations. But do the sentiments of faith bleed — and radiate — into the everyday emergencies and inconveniences? Will we show up?
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book “A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living.” She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan’s pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
