Faith After Fire
Return to Sender: Reflections on light, loss, and spiritual resilience.
Some say the evil eye can undo you. That too much joy, too much beauty, too much visible love invites envy. That when your light shines too bright, it draws the wrong kind of attention.
This is a belief passed down across continents and cultures; woven through Greek villages, Middle Eastern households, South Asian rituals. Similar beliefs—by other names—also appear in rural British and Northern European folklore. Beliefs entrenched in cycles, crossing oceans and generations with deep cultural significance.
But here’s what I believe, and I say this softly, with conviction:
Perhaps the power isn’t in the eye itself, but the belief these forces govern our lives. After all, energy—like all things—holds only the power we give it.
At my core, I’m a California girl. Brought up on the ideals of unbridled freedom and self-determination characteristic of the Wild West. Raised Lutheran, a religion born of protest, insisting that every soul had the right to know God directly. It is a faith rooted in questioning and quiet rebellion. (I’ve always been rather partial to the rebellious.) A faith I still cherish.
(I write this above section about Lutheranism with love—with an acknowledgement of my late grandmother. She and my grandfather spent their retirement in a small California mountain town, where my grandparents taught us to find God not just in a Holy Book but in the granite cliffs, pine forests, and glacial lakes.)
As I grew—through the experiences that cracked and carried me—led by love across borders and belief systems, I began to experience faith not anchored in doctrine, but in presence. Less fixed, more alive.
Some might describe this as Christ Consciousness—not as a dogma, but a frequency. A way of loving.
It’s the idea that the qualities embodied by Jesus—unconditional love, compassion, forgiveness, humility—aren’t reserved for the divine, but are available to all of us. Not simply to worship, but to embody.
(A respectful aside: these teachings are expressed by other spiritual practices and faiths—organized and personal—throughout the world by different names. As I say— “many religions, one Creator”. It’s the message that matters most; and how we choose to live it.)
Simply put, I choose to believe that fear is not of God. And anything that causes you to dim your light, to play it safe in order to feel secure… is not Divine.
Before I sit down to write, I always pray. Nothing formal, no script. I just ask: help me write something that lands in the heart of someone who needs to hear it.
And lately, God has tested every word of that prayer.
In January, we lost our home in one of most devastating wildfires in US history. It’s been four months since then, and just we think we’ve found our footing again, the earth shifts. (Thankfully, I’m an incorrigible optimist and firmly believe these are redirections—but more on that philosophy later.)
After the fire, loved ones reached out asking how they could help—what we needed—but the truth is, we didn’t know. No survivor does, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
What we did know was this: fire survivors (or survivors of any disaster) are tasked with making critical decisions quickly; before the news cycle moves on, before the shock wears off, before the silence sets in.
We said yes to the belief that kindnesses, even when small, are sacred.
Since then, we’ve crossed paths with countless strangers, often simply through conversation—in neighborhoods in Greece, California mountain towns, neighborhood car washes in my hometown—who also, at one point in their lives, lost their home and all their belongings to fire. For some it was a childhood fire decades ago, for others, the fires occurred in recent years. The unanimous takeaway: it’s an experience that fundamentally reshapes your view of the world.
Starting with the most obvious: “I’m a minimalist now. I realized I don’t need anywhere near as many material items as I once imagined.”
But there are countless other lessons as well—each unique to the individual who experienced the loss. Even in a mega fire, where thousands are affected, everyone processes loss and navigates the healing process differently—and no two paths to recoveries (or “normalcy”—whatever that means) look exactly alike.
I’ve known deep loss before.
My father died when I was seven. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. No known cause, no known cure. Just a carousel of trial medications promising hope, delivering none. The drugs were quietly pulled from the market when doctors realized they did more harm than good. He was diagnosed at 41, given two years to live, and passed away at 43.
In the beginning, there were casseroles and cards. But life moves on. Grief doesn’t.
And once you begin to smile again, to rebuild, to glimpse joy—there’s a silent expectation: don’t rise too far beyond the version of you that needed help.
Smile, but not too much. Heal, but don’t thrive too visibly.
Gratitude, after all, is often expected to look like smallness.
Several years ago, I came to understand the Jewish concept of Tzedakah (צדקה). It’s often translated to “charity”—but that’s not quite right. Tzedakah (pronounced tsuh-DAH-kah) literally means “justice” or “righteousness”: giving not because it feels good, but because it’s right. Maimonides, a 12th-century Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, wrote about the eight levels of giving. All levels are significant (if you are curious, I encourage you to learn more about them!) The most significant form has always stayed with me:
1. Helping someone become self-sufficient
— The highest form: Giving someone a job, teaching them a skill, investing in their independence so they no longer need to rely on tzedakah. “Give a man a fish” vs “teach a man to fish.”
This is the kind of giving that teaches, uplifts, and frees. No strings. No ego.
And when you’ve lost everything, that’s all you really want. Not pity. Not performance. Just a clean slate and judgement-free space to rebuild, in whatever way your heart calls you to begin again.
Healing, I’ve learned, is rarely linear.
It doesn’t always look like a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes montage.
Sometimes it’s sobbing on the beach at sunset while the sky performs its evening miracle.
Sometimes it’s logging onto a Zoom meeting and nodding through a discussion on quarterly ROI, when what a survivor really needs to talk about is PTSD.
Sometimes, healing is uploading a selection of camera roll photos from a sunny day spent outdoors—your pets in a meadow, the sun on your face—paired with a caption that embodies peace. You choose to share the beauty you see in the world, because you’re trying to believe in it. And all the while, you're carrying heartbreak and hope in the same breath, giving yourself permission—day by day—to let both coexist.
We’re taught recovery has to look a certain way—like a careful restoration of what was lost. But what if it looks like reinvention?
I’ve come to believe that everything in life fits into one of three categories:
1. A blessing
2. A lesson
3. A redirection
Sometimes, it’s all three.
That’s the lens I live by now. It’s how I make sense of what breaks and what blooms. What stays and what leaves.
So no, I don’t believe in the evil eye—at least not in the traditional sense.
Rather, I choose to subscribe to the belief of resilience. Of soul-level evolution catalyzed by the most challenging of human experiences. I believe we co-create with God, with every step we take.
Call it “cosmic character development”—but I know that within every tragedy, we can find grace.
When God hands you a blank page, you don’t mourn an old storyline. You write something truer, braver, more alive.
And if the world tells you to hide your joy, your talent, your love—to stay invisible in the name of staying safe—I say this:
Let your voice carry. Let your light shine. Let others know love through you.
Because when we see others heal, it’s a win for the collective. Healed people, heal people. It breaks karmic cycles. It liberates our own success.
Because every win is proof it can be done. And someone else’s light doesn’t diminish yours; it only expands the field.
The world reconfigures itself when we realize scarcity—in all its currencies—is a system designed to keep us small.
As it’s written in John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Welcome to the *light* side.