Sometimes a log which has burned in the fire is recovered from conflagration – it may sit without the flames for some time as a heat from within it smolders in unseen chambers below its charcoal surface.

Sometimes we who have long been engulfed by our passions are dragged from our burnings into the cold night air.  We lose sight of our fellows: those other logs who burned along with us, whose own heat added to our own.

And as we rest, humbled in the chilly air of night, away from the brilliant flame that engulfed us, we are wont to surrender.  We have lost our fellowship, the light, and heat of burning souls which strengthened and inspired us with the whisp and crackle of their flame.

Do you long for the heat again?  Do you search for light?

A log holds no will – no desire.  There is no life in a log that sits by the fire though its bark be warmed and dried.  The fire, itself, is the life of the log; a consuming force which animates, brightens, consumes.  Without it the log will lie dead and rotting, infested with parasites.

Christ is the fire that livens the wood – you are the log, will you burn, or just rot?

I lie apart on the cold, lifeless ground – drawn from the fires?  No!  But in the inner chambers of my being the sap boils, and heat smolders.  Swiftly the cold night wind assails me, my exterior shell shivers in the cold, and suddenly a fissure cracks open.  The still rushing wind blows through the fissure, breathing life to the flame inside.

An ember pops loudly, and the sprout of a flame arises.

Are you dead, my beloved?  Or does eternal life dwell within you, awaiting the wind of change – the Spirit of God to breathe life again into your nostrils?

Never give up, my beloved.  Never die.