Fire Up

Better to hurt than to feel numb. Better to feel your heart about to explode in your chest than to count the slow beats appear and fade and appear again.

Better to breathe than to hold the stale air you inhale inside your rusting lungs. Better to love or hate than to experience neutral feeling. Because God wants you hot or cold, not somewhere in between. He wants you on fire, but if you’re ice cold, He’d prefer it over lukewarm. Because your heart is engaged one way or another, and if you forget to feel, you forget to live.

You are breathing, but just barely. Living in a world of gray, veil of mist entwining your mind and unsure where you are headed, what you are feeling. If you could hurt, oh, how you’d let yourself bleed! But when you jab your skin, you are impenetrable. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. You read your Bible but can get nothing from the pages so it eventually stays on your dresser, because you are afraid to be dismayed at your lack of understanding.

Something should be setting you on fire. Instead, you play around in the ashes. You scoop up a handful and watch your fingers stain. There is nowhere to wash away their touch that dries your soul. How can you keep trying to feel and hear and see when your eyes and heart are draped in a dull simmer that unenthusiastically fans itself out?

Better to be burned than to let yourself sit in this barren land, where you’ve cried out for rescue and were met with silence. Questions unanswered, hope unfulfilled. When you rise in the morning, a tiny wisp of your spirit calls for something special. Something extraordinary. But as quickly as it comes, it is covered by a damp blanket of doubt, heavy on your chest.

Fight. Keep fighting. Keep praying, keep seeking, keep crying out into the dark. Pray for that flame. That it will ignite deep in the quiet caverns of your spirit, so one day the warm river of God will come rushing through you, sweeping you up in a flood of feeling and you will at last know how His love can capsize and toss you overboard into an ocean of unquenchable desperation.

Better to crave His presence than to sit and watch Him pass with a blank, empty stare upon your face, etched in your heart.