Hi-Rez & Jordan Meyer - Been A Fire

Reflection

Fire is one of scripture's most layered images, capable of meaning destruction, purification or presence depending on where it appears, from the burning bush that did not consume, to the refiner's fire that purifies precious metal by burning away what is worthless, to tongues of flame resting on the disciples at Pentecost. Describing something as having been a fire in a person's life could carry any of these meanings, and the ambiguity itself is instructive, since real spiritual experience rarely arrives as a single clean category. Difficulty that feels purely destructive in the moment sometimes turns out, much later, to have burned away something that genuinely needed removing. This does not make suffering good in itself, and scripture never claims that it does, but it does suggest that fire, painful as it is, is not always the opposite of God's presence. Sometimes it is, uncomfortably, one of the ways that presence actually shows up.

Questions to sit with

• Has a difficult season in your life ever turned out, in hindsight, to have refined rather than simply harmed you?
• How do you tell the difference between destructive fire and purifying fire while you are still in the middle of it?
• What does the image of the burning bush that is not consumed suggest about God's presence in hardship?