title: A Forced Pause: Living Under God's Intensive Care
author: Christy Burns
description: Christy Burns serves as the Building and Events Coordinator at Timothy Lutheran Ministries in Blue Springs, Missouri. She also serves as the middle school music teacher for Timothy Lutheran School. Her husband, Kent is the Minister of Celebration Arts, and Christy enjoys partnering with him in a variety of music productions and Sunday worship as a singer and keyboardist. Christy has been a featured speaker at a variety of women's retreats, speaking on such topics as: ICU: I Need Hope; The Fruit of the Spirit; Love Never Fails - Signs of Love; Bloom Where You are Planted; Profound Simplicity; Spiritual Disciplines; What is Worship; and Why Should I Pray. Kent and Christy have three sons: T.J. (22), Alex (17), and Nathan (14) and reside in Blue Springs, Missouri.
zlib_text: ## Chapter One
  
  “Whoever they were, they sure didn’t believe in housekeeping,” Mildred Wyeth
  said dryly as she surveyed the smoke-blackened walls and the piles of trash
  that littered the floor of the redoubt room. Once an office, the comp
  terminals had been ripped from the walls, the desks had been broken up for
  firewood. The garbage spread across the room had the look of something long
  dead, a fire extinguished by the smoke-triggered sprinkler system.
  
  Doc Tanner stood in the doorway behind Mildred Wyeth, shaking his head sadly
  and making tsking noises through his teeth. “Truly, this is a sad sign of the
  madness that descended on people when the fires rained from the heavens.
  Consider it, my dear doctor. From the condition of the wreckage, and the
  perfect stillness that seems to surround us, I would be not in the least
  surprised to learn that this was perpetrated some decades ago. Possibly almost
  a full century.”
  
  “Your point being?” The black woman sighed. She knew where Doc was goin