Why We Love Firemen
My husband Ray is a former volunteer fireman. Our son Chris followed in his boots and helmet. The heroes of 9-11 made the whole nation proud. All of these reasons and many more have given us an affection for those men and women in bunker gear. These are not the reasons I love firemen though.

My parents sent me to church from the time I was in second grade and asked if I could go. Later school friends would invite me to come to their churches. I even sang in the Jr. Choir at a church near our house. All that time I knew that someday I would be a Christian. I kept putting off my decision to believe with all my heart, because I had so much living I wanted to do before I started trying to live up to all those rules. My life took a turn to the wild side thinking that was the way to get in all that living I wanted.

When my son Chris was a year old and I had long abandoned any regular church attendance, I began to think that it would me good for Chris if I started taking him to church. There was a little Pentecostal church just down the road from me, I would take him there. He spent his time in nursery, I spent my time trying to not let the words the pastor was preaching make me too uncomfortable. I knew that Pastor Lyon was not talking right to me, but I also knew that I needed to respond to what he was saying in some way. My logical response was to try to be a better person. When that did not work then I could come up with reasons why the words he was saying were not really for me. It would have been easy to just quit going to church. Chris spent a good deal of his time in nursery sobbing for me. But I did not quit because I felt an unreasonable compulsion to keep going, to read a Bible that for the most part did not make a whole lot of sense to me. I wanted to understand about God and Jesus, the Bible, heaven and hell. I knew that I did not want to go to hell, I just was not sure I was ready to be good enough to go to heaven.

Not understanding my Bible, I did not realize that no one is good enough to go to heaven. Listening to Pastor Lyon was starting to help me understand that there was something important about the cross and Jesus dying on it. He did it for me precisely because I was not ever going to be good enough on my own to go to heaven. I realized that what Jesus did, spilling his blood and dying, was for me. It was not a mistake as I had imagined. Instead it was a deliberate act on His part because it paid for my sin. I knew about sin. I had been to all those Sunday Schools. I knew the Ten Commandments, I had seen the visual aids different teachers had used to show me that if I was guilty of one of those sins I could not go to heaven. I knew that it would not matter how good I tried to be, nothing could erase my sin. I lived my life feeling guilty and dirty. I spent time trying to find a way to forget about this Jesus, and the heaven that I could not go to. I became a party girl and an adrenalin junky. Sometimes I went the other way being kind and generous. I could distract myself for a while, but heaven and my sin always came back to me. Now Pastor Lyon was standing in front of this small congregation of believers telling what it was that Jesus did on the cross to pay for our sin, for my sin, and I knew I needed Jesus. I knew the unreasonable truth that he did what he did because he loved me.

I sat in my seat clenching my jaw and the book in my lap. I felt afraid and did not understand why. My eyes were full of tears that I would not let fall. I thought to myself that same old thought, "some day I will be a Christian". I was not ready to change my life, to be the "goody two shoes" that I thought I would need to be. But then the pastor told us the story of the fireman.

There was a fire in a high-rise apartment building. When the trucks arrived the fire crew knew that there would be no saving the old building, they would need to concentrate on saving people. In one of the upper windows a woman could be seen. A fireman and ladder were sent quickly to her window to rescue her from the flames that surrounded her. It should be an easy save, the ladder easily reached the womans window. The fireman reached out to help the woman who could not help herself out of the burning building. As she was reaching out for his hand she suddenly stopped, and turned away, saying that there was something she needed first. Knowing there was no time to spare, the fireman called out to her to just take his hand now, a moment later would be too late! But she insisted that there was just one thing that she needed first and that she would not take long. As she turned to walk away, the fire weakened floor clasped under her feet and she fell into that fiery pit of the burning building, all because there was something she wanted before she was saved. The weeping fireman was later heard to say, "she was so close, if she would only have taken my outstretched hand she would have been saved."

I got the point. I was shook. I knew that I was the woman in the story and Jesus, who gave everything for me, was the fireman. I could all but see him reaching through the flames to me. I had been looking for life. I thought it would be found outside of Jesus, I had been turning away from that outstretched hand looking for "life" when all along it was to be found in the nail scared hand reaching out to me. What I had been denying the hand of salvation for would lead to a fiery pit. That November morning in 1978 I put my hand in Jesus hand. He saved me. I have never been sorry, I have not missed out on life, instead, I have begun to live.

A few of our favorite things...
We love to go on Road Trips or what we like to call our great adventures. We both love to take pictures and Deb loves to write. If we have had a great time then we will publish our pictures and the discoveries we have made on this site, or if it is a really wonderful adventure and we also have a great set of pictures to share, then we will put the whole story on deb and company.

Another thing that we both love is camping and hiking. Whether it is simply walking the abandoned logging roads in Robe Valley, or taking an established trail we know of, or a day of bird watching somewhere, we long to do it. We live in one of the best places in the country for getting out of the car and experiencing the sight and smell, and even to feel the soft rain as well as the life giving sun.

We have a love--hate relationship with gardening On a beautiful day it is great to turn up the soil, to smell the living earth, to feel the warmth of the soil under our feet and in our hands. Then again, there is weeding, not bad when you have kept up with it, a nightmare when there are more weeds then what you meant the earth to produce. It always seems as if the peak season is also the time when we really want to be somewhere else. The temptation to let it all go is great at times.

Since Deb (That would be Mrs. Hagerty when she is wearing her school marm gear) has the privilege of teaching a weekly devotions class to a group of students from second to third grade. She will try to keep up with the weekly lessons on the Devotions page.

Being Vegan is more a passion for Deb then Ray, but he is also careful about what he eats. We try to keep up with recipe and menu ideas on the Vegan page.

It is our hope that you learn something new, grow, and most of all, enjoy your time here.

I'd love to hear from you!
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Deb and Company