fuel

It's maple syrup season here in North Central PA and with quite a few friends who are very dedicated to making the dark dream liquid that makes everything better, I've heard quite a bit about it lately. If you're not familiar with the process, the freeze and subsequent thaw of the winter here in PA causes maple trees to pump large amounts of "sap" up thru their bark when the thaw comes after all it's nutrients and water has been locked up for months in frozen suspension. During these runs, studious gathers bore holes in the trees and use a series of collection mechanisms to harvest a bit of the sugary water. The sap runs for a number of weeks and depending on the amount of trees it can be quite a bit of production that happens. But the process of making maple syrup is just starting with the trees. It actually takes 40 gallons of sap to make just a single gallon of syrup... but how do you get it reduced? LOTS and LOTS of heat, for heat you need fuel. 

I was thinking about this concept quite a bit as i stare at the piles and piles of wood a friend of mine uses each year to make this champion of breakfast products. SO much fuel! The fires that refine the sap into syrup burn hot and long, steaming off all the unnecessary water in order to leave just the darkest purest sugars that anyone has ever tasted. 

It got me thinking about my spiritual life and just how much fuel I have to burn. It often seems to me that on a good day I'm dealing with a  lot more water in my life than I am with the real sweet sugar. The fire burns low if at all and often I feel like I'm barely smoldering rather than housing an unquenchable fire within that burns away all the excess in my life. So what do we do about this? Good question...

What fuel can we add to the fire of our souls? One thing that's been stoking me up right now is PRAYER. I've been having a lot of conversations and reading some great stuff on prayer and how the hand of God moves when His people pray, but what am I doing to foster real prayer in my life? Well I've been convicted of that... like a little spark being lit. One idea I came up with the other day was to do something very practical. I have 600+ "friends" on Facebook, some I know very well, others are just barely acquaintances. While I was looking over the list the other day I felt a very tangible tug from God saying, "Hey why don't you print that list and carry it around with you for a while." The challenge was in my heart to spend thirty days praying... it works about to praying for about 21 people each day. It's been some great fuel. I've been doing it for a few days now and man I'm so blessed to have some of these people in my life! I'm reminded daily of just who God has brought across my path in my life and much more than that, who he's using to shape and mold me into the man I'm becoming. With this little flicker a flame is beginning...

Now with that and these other conversations another stick got added to the cauldron... tonight we had our first Nexus Prayer service. We started a saturday night worship service that meets twice a month for a more informal/conversational worship service which has been a huge joy, honestly it's keeping my fire lit right now, but it needed to be more. For the first time we dedicated ourselves to prayer. Nexus has been running just under the 40 mark which is awesome but tonight with college students away we only had about a dozen of us. As we planned for this night we mixed worship with prayer and hoped for the best. IT was the best... God met us in our little room. We prayed for so much and I know that God moved on peoples hearts... stoking the fire. 

When I think of prayer I'm often brought to my own preconceived notions of a stuffy silence... people talking at the ceiling and watching they're prayers fall to the floor. How much farther from the truth could any notion ever be. I posted a picture I took the other day at the top of this post. It's of an old barn that I ran across the other day. Shabby and old from the outside. Beginning the slow fade into oblivion that all things are destined to pursue. As I sat there looking at it though I felt the voice of the Lord saying "is this what your prayer life looks like, broken down and faded?" How do I answer that!? Uh, yeah sorta... Then I felt again a small voice whispering..."it doesn't have to be". Who knows what's inside that old barn, probably lots of dusty nothings, but maybe just maybe there is exquisite beauty. What if we took over the spaces like that in our lives and made something beautiful out of them? What if from those old structures came unapproachable light, every crack giving insight to the blazing glory of a well fueled fire. 

I know my fire's building, it's being bolstered all around me... in the lives of God's people who are rising to take the Word of God seriously. They are no longer satisfied with just talking about God but they want to worship Him like he's in the room. They want to pray right too Him. They want to let the fire of refinement burn unquenchable in their souls. That's where I want to be too. God's on the move we've just gotta catch up and let the motion fan the flames in our souls. I hope you are able to find something to stoke up your soul. May the God that dwells in inapproachable light be the source and sustainer of our flames. For His Honor, and Glory, Forever and Ever.