Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Written the following day.

Do you ever feel as if your heart is on fire? I don’t mean a physical ailment. I mean with a passion for something that may just well consume you if you allow it. That fire that takes over and may render you incapable of breathing if you don’t harness it and learn what it is to temper it for a useful purpose. A few years back Sara Groves wrote a song about the prophet Jeremiah wherein she implores, “Jeremiah, tell me about the fire that burns up in your bones,” a reference to Jeremiah 20:9 where Jeremiah claims if he refuses to mention God or call upon him “then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Most of the time, I find that fire in my heart for the things I’m passionate about is manageable. It moves me, motivates me, pushes me to do more, to be better, to think more often about the questions that are hard to answer, to remember those who are poor and have nothing—to never forget them, to never forget that the same God who made me made them with the same hands, and to never allow myself to believe that I don’t have the power to change things, that to remember who I am is to remember I serve a God who is above all and over all and who is not limited by human ambition which means neither am I.

But sometimes it’s too much and sometimes that fire is all consuming and makes me feel as if my heart just may explode from the intensity of it. This was my Tuesday, a day full of a burning passion that rendered me rather useless. But, yet, this is what pulls me back into who I am and what I’m called to. These are the days that remind me of the authenticity of my relationship with God and what that means for me as God’s child, as her daughter. In this setting I live in where a Godly relationship is defined by how many minutes one spends with God each day and the swear words we make sure not to speak, how I am with God feels so foreign to how I watch others relate to God, or at least pretend to. So it is days like this, when that all-consuming fire envelops me, where God says to me, “Remember you are mine and no one else’s, and I have created you for a specific purpose that is unique to you.”

These days pop up now and then, but it is not unusual for them to happen near the beginning of every summer for me. It is that time in my life when the craziness of the things I don’t care much for settles down and room is opened for the space to remember what my true passion is and what my heart is calling to me, what God is speaking into my very being.

I never really know what this means for me. Someday it will mean something far bigger than it means now, but I do know I am being given the space to learn again. Not to learn theology or philosophy or the chiasm in a given segment survey in the book of Mark, but to learn the things that throw fuel into the fire, to learn the things that feed it oxygen and make it burn like the beacon it sometimes is for me. It’s time to remember where my heart really is, to remember what and who it is I really love. I’m not really sure where to begin again this summer, and yet it seems as if I already have. How this will manifest itself is a little unclear. I wonder if perhaps, first, I should reread the book of Jeremiah. It’s never a bad place to start.