Burning World

So you know how when one thing goes wrong, everything starts to come crashing down at once? I am have experienced it more than once… more than twice… actually I can’t even count the amount of times that one thing goes wrong and then the entire world starts to burn.

So you have this burning world and all you can see are the flames.

Wow… am I a writer for a heavy metal band? Geeze… No… So lets see where that leads us…

When things catch on fire, are you look at are the flames, not what is underneath, or around it. There is a reason we say consumed by flames… but when things are burning we forget to see the before and after… and even during of the thing being consumed, and seemingly destroyed, by the inferno.

Before everything is fine, but during the flames its all that we see. We can’t see hope or light. All we feel is a burning hell. and we just wait for the fire to end… to have relief. And that’s what the challenge is. To focus on the after… suffering is suffering. But FROM it comes new growth.

After a forest burns, new life starts. We are like a forest. So a quote from one of my favorite movies, A Walk to Remember:

“Without suffering, there would be no compassion.”

After Jaime says this, Landon continues to try and contradict her by saying

“Yeah well tell that to the ones who suffer.”

Here is the thing, LANDON… everyone suffers. Despite if you have had a “hard life” or not. We have pain. But this is not the point, the point is that from our suffering, we gain compassion for others that are suffering. We experience first hand the Sins and cruelties of the world so we can reach out to others from our scars from the flames, to the ones that are burning now.  Christ did this, he went through all that we did. He endured the flames and he reached out to all of us who are burning and he encourages us to do that now.

So we may only see flames… and we may only feel the fire… but we need to focus on the after. That Christ works in weird ways. I KNOW this. From the worst time in my entire life, I gained my best friend in the entire world. Did I see than then? NO… But because of this, I know to look past the flames… to endure the fire… the heat. And Christ will soothe my burns, and give me the compassion that he had on me.

I know my thoughts are scattered… even as I type… But all i know is what I feel, and what I feel is what I write.

J