Firefighters Daughter Quotes

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear. There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young nun not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you Secondly there is the slow erosion-a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child's nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no rare. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees' faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business. And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

I had the opportunity to be part of a movement for change, so that daughters would be cherished as much as sons, and women could achieve whatever their talent and hard work enabled them to achieve. There should be no artificial barriers, no spaces women can’t enter. There were many closed doors in my growing-up years. There was a time when women were not accepted as members of the bar. There were no women judges. Very few women engineers. No women police officers. No women firefighters. No women pilots of planes. Those barriers are now, thank goodness, gone, and women can do whatever their talent enables them to do. Of course, it takes not only talent, but willingness to work hard, to make dreams come true.

I’ve always wanted to go to the Daddy-Daughter Dance. I thought if you married the firefighter, I might finally get to go.

Now it’s on all the TVs in the bar. The announcers are saying the FBI determined Analise Compton was kidnapped by two people, Donovan Creed and Callie Carpenter, who were holding her at Creed’s Virginia estate. We watch in horror as our photos are superimposed over the firefight taking place in the background. Callie and I sneak out of the bar and rush to her car.

When the alarm rang at the Cedar Cove firehouse, Mack and his fellow firefighters jumped into action. The address was relayed as he leaped onto the fire truck, and the familiarity of it struck him immediately, although he didn’t have time to think about it. Not until the truck, lights flashing and sirens blaring, turned onto Eagle Crest Avenue did he realize the house belonged to Ben and Charlotte Rhodes. Mack had visited there often, taking his daughter, Noelle, to see her grandparents. The smoke billowing out of the house came from the back, where the kitchen was located