Fire

I rearranged two rooms in my house so that I could sit by the fire this winter. I bought wood by the bundle from a convienence store so that I could sit by the fire. I finally broke down and ordered a half cord of wood, dumped in my driveway and moved and neatly stacked by two teenage boys so I could sit by the fire. There's only one problem - the wood barely burns. I can't just sit by the fire without hours of tending to it. It turns out that the wood is red oak, excellent for generating heat, notorious for resisting ignition. And guess what? I think God showed me something in all this. Because after trying everything I could to get the fire to catch, I stuck in a log from my last bundle from the convienence store. That wood ignites easily and burns fast. The other logs were no longer burning at all, just some embers. I put the new log in and blew and blew and blew on the embers. There was some smoke and that's all. Finally the Spirit whispered to me, "Where there is smoke, there is fire" and somehow I knew I was supposed to stop all my efforts and just wait and see what would happen to the fire. So I did. Shortly after that, the new log burst into flame and the hard, red oak logs also caught on fire. And I learned a spiritual lesson. It's about who I am and what the Lord has called me to do. See, the hard logs were prepared by all that I had done to try and get the fire started, but it was the presence of the highly flammable log that actually made the fire catch. These days I feel like a highly flammable log. I am captured by the fire of God all the time. So I don't need to do much to get the fire started in those around me, just catch on fire myself!