This week I have found myself sideswept headlong into a pace and quiet I haven’t been in for a long while.  Without need to give the details, I have been sick and in bed all week…and my usual day-to-day life has come to a rapid and unexpected halt.

Sickness is an incredible stripper of all the extras. All the extra words. All the extra strengths. All the extra abilities. With one sweeping strike and I am left curled up with the fresh  remembrance of my frailty and the genuine truth of my smallness.I am so weak. I am so poor.

The Living Flame Abiding

And yet here, in the midst of my poverty, I’ve been brought close to something I haven’t got to witness in a long while. The little fire within. Yes, I’ve known it was there because it had to be…but this week I’ve witnessed it firsthand as I haven’t in awhile, as though peering with face pressed to a window to find an old constant companion in the backrooms of my heart.

It’s the fire of my communion with the Lord that forms the heartbeat of all my living, that quiet throb of burnings that rises long before there is language and continues long after the words have run out.I cannot live without this fire. It is love ignited within the inner man by the Lord’s own hand and love tended to by His own careful attention. It is the fire that cannot be taken from me…come what may.

My Most Precious Possession that cannot be Taken

Externals may change. Strengths rise and fade. Freedoms come and go. Yet what can never be taken from me is that which was born in the place of utter poverty, where I possessed nothing and Jesus poured forth His everything in love.

This is what the stillness, the silence, and the weakness of these days has brought me to. The fire is alive and well. It is my most precious possession.

Many waters cannot quench this love. Nor can the floods drown it. It’s flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame (Song. 8:7).