"Consumed by either fire or fire"

I cannot sleep.

And God is battering away at my heart.

“When the lamp is lit, who looks at the wick?”

This is Annie Dillard’s phrase for what it means to be an artist, to a person surrendered to the fires of God. What is meant by being a living sacrifice, to be “on fire for God,” to have the flame-tongue of the Holy Spirit licking away at your scalp.

Crouched over in prayer on my floor at 3 a.m. this morning, I asked God for a vision, for a picture that would sustain me through the battles I am facing, and this was what came to mind. This image of a flame of fire on top my head, walking around like those flannel-graph stories from Sunday school, when the bath-robed apostles are bestowed squiqqly-orange cut-outs of fire, jutting out from their foreheads like plumes of a hat.

When the lamp is lit, who looks at the wick?

So many times at home in the States this past week I have had friends tell me how much they admire me, how much they are impressed by what I’m doing. A mentor said to me, “you lead such a rich life.”

But who can notice or care when sometimes it feels like I’m being burnt alive? And the image that I received in my cries of prayer was this image of flame, and a wick giving light to a room. People are looking at your life and seeing me, Jesus said. I nodded, and shook with belief.

But meanwhile, my flesh and my heart are burning up, “for the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.” I am a living sacrifice, the flame of the Spirit never consumes me whole, so I’m constantly burning and burning. And so how is this everlasting fire of witness not just the same as the fires of hell?

Are you willing to be this witness?

This is the question, again and again. To which I must continue to learn to say yes. “I am the handmaiden of the Lord; let it be to me as you have said.”

But how this burning, this giving light, this perpetual sacrifice of hope and heart and life? – without burning up or dying, without being fully consumed. It would be easier simply to die – and that is part of this agony, that something is dying a death. Some things for death, and some for resurrection.

To be called out, called upon is to be called into fire – the fire of presence, of refining, of sacrifice, and of renunciation.

“Where else can we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.”