The Space Between…
“…He’s solid rock under my feet, breathing space for my soul…”
Psalm 62:5-6 (MSG)
It is fire season and in our House, there are two types of people: those who like the fire to burn furiously to try and warm their home as quickly as possible, so they pile on the logs prematurely and often extinguish the fire. And then there is those who like to conserve the wood (knowing it needs to last the whole of winter and they’re the ones that have to chop it), so they keep the fire burning low, which does little in warming our home.
Because of the season we are in, both in the physical and in the spiritual, I have been thinking about what makes a fire burn well and in my reading I came across this poem by Judy Brown:
Fire
“What makes a fire burn
is a space between the logs,
a breathing space…
… so building fires
requires attention
to the space between,
as much as to the wood…”
Sometimes our tendency can be to pile on the logs thinking that it will make the fire hotter. It seems that we are often ‘more’ creatures – more activity, more doing, more consuming, more power, more money, more Netflix, more scrolling and so on. Sometimes ‘more’ is the right answer, but I wonder if in always doing ‘more’ we fail to pay attention to ‘the space between.’
Obviously the quality of the wood matters, but as any good fire-builder knows it’s not necessarily about more or less wood, but about what is in between. Perhaps our approach to building fires in our lives (or fanning the flames of what God is doing), is not so much about piling on or going easy with the wood, but realising that it is “both fuel and the absence of fuel together, that make fire possible”.
Searching with you for ‘the space between.’
- Jo Peart
Link to full poem: https://www.judysorumbrown.com/blog/breathing-space
