Feed the Fire
When my two best friends and I did our annual birthday retreat to an Air B&B last year we were so bummed that the electric fireplace was the only thing in the big beautiful wood cabin that wasn’t working. In this year’s house, we had a real working wood fireplace, only none of us have never started a real fire in a fireplace before!
With no instructions and not wanting to take out our phones and connect to Google in what felt like a retreat from the connected world, we tried to do it on our own with the matches, pieces of paper, and wooden logs left for us just outside of the fireplace.
The paper burned no problem, but soon died out as it wouldn’t transfer to the wooden logs. We kept trying to change the placement of where we put the paper, making sure the wood wasn’t wet and completely dry, creating a teepee style arrangement like we see at camps, and making sure the fire had oxygen to keep going.
But it would soon die again.
Finally, my friend Traci said, I think we have to keep feeding the fire. The paper burns out too quickly and the logs don’t have a chance to catch it. So she kept throwing more and more paper into the fire and wood and pushing the paper around to encourage it to burn and catch the wood.
And after a while of doing this…it did.
To keep the fire, we had to feed the fire!
The expression of feeding the fire is defined as provoking a person’s anger to further a controversy. And it dawned on us why that expression to feed the fire came about. If you just light it and walk away, it dies. But if you keep throwing more kindling and wood on it, it will keep burning.
What fire do you need to feed?
Maybe we haven’t found peace yet because we need to keep tending to it piece by piece and adding more. It will catch on, but it needs a little more time (and wood)!
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” -Isaiah 32:12
