King David gives us a profoundly comforting prayer of reassurance in Psalm 23. We generally take this prayer as a whole story, but one can isolate and distill verse 4, particularly in desperate times or during dramatic events: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me."

As a boy, I experienced a circumstance in the wilderness when unfolding events quickly overran any spiritual stamina. Truly, the desert chaparral whispers of beauty and solitude. But it sometimes turns its might on you on a whim and becomes a desperate place, demanding all your resources. Dusk can be one of those times.

My father was a leathery, bronzed field geologist, who surveyed for Air Force emergency landing sites across the U.S. Southwest. He was also a family man and insisted that his family stay with him. That included his wife, five kids aged six months to ten years old, and a sloppy teenager named Chuck, whom we called "The Babysitter." Dad insisted, even if it required camping in the desert.

One hot August—it was 1964—we were stationed in Great Boiling Spring, Nevada. Great Boiling Spring is a sulfurous hot spring and an occasional geyser on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. It is 120 miles west of Winnemucca and 108 miles north of Reno. Yes, it is smack in the middle of nowhere. These two towns are the nearest civilization. There is a little one-pump place called Gerlach within a couple of miles, but the only food a person might find in Gerlach is Coca-Cola in a vending machine. If you visit, you'd better be prepared with a month of supplies.

And we were. Mama had driven to Winnemucca with all the kids, bought a station wagon load of provisions, and filled our little home with groceries stacked to the eaves. Our "home" was a two-room, waxed-canvas army tent with a sewn-in floor. The "eaves" were its canvas roof. Dad set the tent up in a patch of parched grass in the middle of the vast unknown. Actually, the Black Rock Desert had been a bombing and gunnery range left over from World War II, now inactive.

A grocery run was an all-day affair. Twilight approached. Baby Robert dozed in a pop-up camper, and Mama napped beside him. Daddy was fifty miles off in the wild Black Rock Desert, collecting soil samples. The rest of us four kids played lazily on the warm canvas floor of the army tent. The afternoon shadows lengthened, and the desert wind kicked up dust devils as the temperature differential grew stark in the mountain shadows.

The baby's empty playpen rocked upwind of the canvas tent. Chuck filled the Coleman lantern with kerosene on the prickly thatch between the playpen and the tent. Did I mention Chuck was sloppy? Kerosene soaked the dry ground around him.

Just as Chuck lit the Coleman lamp, the wind gusted again. The playpen upended and tumbled right across the spilled kerosene and burst into flames. It kept rolling. The fireball swept downwind until it was stopped by the only door of our canvas tent. The still-sun-softened wax immediately burst into a wall of fire.

We four kids in the tent stiffened in petrified horror and inaction. The ceiling of the tent became a sky full of boiling and rushing flames. We were trapped in a broiler, and the wall of fire in front of us was our only escape.

Daddy was inaccessible. Chuck tried to stamp out the flames until his leg became a torch. His pant leg burned off. He took off running, driven by fear or pain, or maybe to get help in Gerlach. Pieces of flaming wax began dripping from the ceiling onto the floor.

To our left, there came a mighty ripping sound, and a great gash in the canvas wall suddenly showed Mama's face staring into the flaming cauldron. She reached in and pulled us out bodily, one after another, throwing us behind her and returning for the next kid. Even fire dare not come between Mama and her cubs. She had torn the army canvas with her bare hands.

We fought alongside Mama the rest of the daylight and on into the night, carrying water from the hot spring to the wildfire engulfing the tent. Shards of flaming debris formed comets streaking downwind into dry grass. When night spread across the destruction, the glowing blaze became visible to men in the field. In the dark, Daddy arrived from Gerlach with men, shovels, buckets, and brawn. They beat at the blaze with wet Indian blankets until there was nothing left but piles of pulsing embers. They continued fighting into the night. Crowded into one small camper, we kids fell into exhausted sleep.

The next morning, acrid char covered five acres of chaparral. We helped Mama sift through the rubble and soot that had been our fully-stocked tent. Expressions of shock and awe announced the discovery of broiled apples, matches charred on the wrong end, hard-cooked eggs still in the shell, and swollen cans of fully-cooked mush that were blackened and inedible after they were opened. Most of our possessions were no more.

But there was a certain unspoken thrill in the air. Laughter and joy permeated the atmosphere as we rummaged through the rubble as if it were some new adventure. We had all survived.

Much is set aside in a crisis of magnitude, and the fleeting nature of possessions becomes apparent. Solomon spent a lifetime testing and researching the pleasure of physical things, as he writes in Ecclesiastes 2:1-11, but he concludes that all material things are vanity, gone in a flash. However, there are things that will last and grow: family, experience, God's protection, and forgiveness.

In Ephesians 4:32, Paul urges us to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Daddy found Chuck soaking his raw leg in canteen water on the side of the road a half mile toward town. The following week, Daddy bought Chuck a one-way Greyhound ticket home from Winnemucca. Years later, we found out that he had grown up and done a tour of duty in Korea, fighting the Communists pouring in from China. He may have won a medal. We were proud of him.

Even amid trials and tribulations, we can find hope and strength in God, family, and the promise of redemption. We can trust in God's protection, cherish our family bonds, and not be overly attached to material possessions.