Fire Detected!

Surrendering hypervigilance to Jesus

“Fire detected.”

The message scrolled across the screen of our Ford Explorer the minute Daniel turned the keys in the ignition to make the 30 minute ride home from our friends’ house after a fun-filled dinner with friends.

Neither of us saw the warning. We were too busy trying to quiet our overtired and howling toddler who was not pleased to be leaving his favorite red Solo cup behind. Plus there was super noisy screeching static on the radio, and our senses were entirely overloaded.

But Evie, my highly sensitive, highly anxious 14-year-old saw it, and the panic was swift. “Mom! Mom! Mom! We have to get out NOW!” she bellowed. “Pull over! Pull over! PULL OVER!!!!”

I silenced the radio and turned around in my seat. “Calm down!” I commanded. “What are you even talking about?”

She informed me that there was a fire warning on my screen and that we were all basically going to die if we didn’t exit the car post haste. Daniel and I looked at each other because it made no sense. Surely if my car was going to issue a fire warning, the entire dashboard would be lit up like a Christmas tree, right? It wouldn’t be indicated by a brief warning isolated to a corner of my radio screen. It wouldn’t disappear the minute I turned off the radio.

I Googled as we drove and found very little information that matched my search terms. We made it home without incident but still thought it was weird and, out of an abundance of caution, I scheduled a service appointment with the car dealership.

It took me another day to connect the dots and realize that my toddler’s tablet is technically called an “Amazon Fire” and that it had been plugged into the port in our vehicle when we started the ignition, so it actually made a lot of sense for a fire to be “detected.”

My daughter wasn’t crazy. She had, in fact, read the message. She had just interpreted it through a lens of fear, anxiety, and catastrophe and had thus taken it to a place it never needed to go.

I’m obviously painting a broader analogy here, one I believe carries a degree of relevance for a lot of people. Our respective filters can clutter objectivity and cause us to interpret situations in wonky ways that disturb our peace. I think abuse survivors, in particular, are often left to do this unsettling dance of doubting our own perceptions and inserting a filter of skepticism and distrust onto situations and people that may not always deserve it. We can inadvertently create monsters that aren’t even there in order to preemptively defend ourselves against attacks that are not actually coming.

Hypervigilance is a costly way to live, and people without a trauma lens will often bristle against it. Relationships with those of us who live this way can feel like hugging a cactus. We’re prickly. We’re suspicious. We’re needlessly critical of both ourselves and others. We’re like heat seeking missiles who scour every nook and cranny of a situation for its potential to injure us, and then we poke and prod at the areas we’ve deemed dangerous until they explode and prove us right and vindicate our decision to withhold relationship or trust.

The confusing thing is that we’re often right, and learning to know which instincts to trust and which ones to quash can be really exhausting, confusing, and downright scary work. It’s not work that’s meant to be done alone, but even knowing which helpers to trust can be an uphill battle. If you examine any human long enough, you’ll find the chink in the armor—the weak spot that’s destined to fail you if you push hard enough on it. If I’m honest with myself, I have to acknowledge that I’m uniquely skilled in finding peoples’ weaknesses and using them as a reason to hold them at arms’ length. This is not the most endearing of my habits; no one wants to feel your silent scrutiny at every given moment. They mostly want to be loved and encouraged despite their imperfections. I know that’s how I want to be treated.

For some of us, optimism does not come naturally, and training ourselves into it can feel completely false and insincere. That hardly means we shouldn’t do the work. Instead of approaching every situation wondering what could go wrong and how I can protect myself from it, I’m making a conscious effort to at least TRY to wrestle with the question, “What could go right?” and, more importantly, “How can I demonstrate the love of Jesus in this situation regardless?”

Instead of weaponizing peoples’ weaknesses against them, can I commit to praying life and healing into the gaps I see? Instead of judging others for being human just like me, can I identify with their struggle? Can I relate to them in the broken places, acknowledging that I’ve got more than enough funk of my own to keep people sufficiently at bay? How might I fare if subjected to my own standard of treatment?

The fact that my trauma brain defaults to hypervigilance is not my fault. But what I choose to do with what I perceive in that space is absolutely my responsibility.

Philippians 4:8 commands Christians:

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

I’ve got the true, honorable, and just part in the bag. Truth and justice are my jam. But the decision to focus on the lovely and praiseworthy? Oof. That’s a taller order.

The fire I want people to be able to detect in my life is a burning passion to share the goodness of the God I serve, not a self-destructive hot-headed commitment to self-preservation at all costs. I’ve got some work to do there.

Anyone else?