Sitting in front of my fireplace watching the logs smolder I began contemplating why the fire burns well sometimes but at others it just sits there and smolders. I know there have been times that I have brought in "green" wood that is still so wet it doesn't want to burn but there are also times when I use seasoned wood that just sits there smoldering!
While growing up my family spent many weekends camping. One of the things I remember my dad doing on some of these camping trips was filling a paper cup with water and placing it in the middle of the fire. We all know that paper burns readily, much easier than wood, but the paper cup filled with water does not! As an adult sitting around a campfire with friends I demonstrated this to their teenage son. We even went so far as to boil an egg in the cup in the middle of the fire.
On another camping trip to Telos lake in Maine when I was in my teens I remember waking up Saturday morning cold and damp from the steady rain all night long. How I longed for a campfire to warm me up and dry me out! With everything dripping wet from the rain I didn't see how that was possible.
During the night a large group of Boy Scouts had set up camp next to us. What amazed me was that just a few minutes after climbing out of their tents they had a roaring fire going! Since this campsite was at the head of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and was canoe in - canoe out, I knew they had NOT brought in their own dry firewood. A few minutes later they had a second fire burning. It seemed they knew a few things about the physics of fire that I had yet to learn! After watching them start a third fire I set out to build my own. I collected a large handful of birch bark and shredded it into tiny pieces in the fire pit. I then collected a second handful of birch bark tearing it into larger pieces, placing it on top of the other pieces. From there I added tiny sticks, getting them bigger and bigger until they were about the size of my thumb. I then added larger logs that had been split down to almost kindling wood, again getting larger and larger until I was placing whole logs on the pile. I discovered that it was important to make sure the fire was completely "built" before lighting it. When I lit the shredded birch bark at the bottom of the pile it ignited quickly and rapidly spread through the entire pile, eventually lighting the whole logs on fire. In just a few minutes I had a blazing fire made completely out of wet material.
A 15 I didn't think much about how or why it worked, I was just glad to have a fire to warm me up and dry me out! As I have grown older I have contemplated the "why" a little bit more. It has something to do with heats of combustion and heats of evaporation. The paper cup filled with water does not burn because the heat of combustion of the paper cup is higher than the heat of evaporation of the water - until all of the water is gone the cup can't reach a high enough temperature to ignite. The same principle works for the wet wood campfire - the heat of combustion for the shredded birch bark is below the boiling point (heat of evaporation) of water allowing the birch bark to burn while wet. When burning enough heat is produced to ignite the larger pieces of birch bark, which produces enough heat to dry out the smaller sticks and ignite them - all the way up to the largest logs. One of the interesting realities about fire is it is not the flames that ignite other wood, it is the heat that is generated. The flames are simply the visible manifestation of the invisible heat being generated!
As I sit here watching the flames in my fireplace I wonder "am I on fire, or am I just smoldering?" In my spiritual life have I reached the heat of combustion, am I on fire for God? I can purchase an electric fireplace that gives an illusion of flames, but those "flames" do not generate enough heat to light anything on fire. Am I going through the motions, creating an illusion of fire, but not generating enough heat to set anyone else on fire for God? Am I trying to burn but I allow the cares of this world to water me down so I never reach the heat of combustion, never catching on fire, smoldering my life away without generating any useful heat? Do we allow the afflictions, perplexities, persecutions, and trials to crush and destroy us, or as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4: 8 & 9 NASB “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed”. In verse 10 he goes on to tell us why the previous can happen, “always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.” The only way we can be on fire for Jesus is for us to die to sin allowing the life of Jesus to be manifest in us. It is not heat that we generate, instead it is the heat generated by the life of Jesus being lived through us.
