Coal I Cannot Lift

Opal wakes in the chair a little after seven with the blanket still over her knees and the grate down to a red glow with a gray skin over it.

The back room of the house on Hanley Fork is cold in February in a way the front room never is, and it is the room she lives in anyway, because it has the fire and the good light and the chair her husband made a footstool for in nineteen sixty one.

She sits and looks at the grate for a while, the way you do.

There is coal. That is the thing. The scuttle is right there on the tiles, black and full, because Cyrus Dean from the next place up fills it on Saturdays and shovels the ash out and never makes anything of it. He is seventeen and does not say four words while he does it.

The coal is there. She is seventy eight and her wrists are what they are, and she cannot lift the scuttle. She can lift a lump at a time with the little tongs, and some mornings she can and some mornings she cannot, and this is one of the mornings.

So she sits and watches the last of it go orange and then gray, and the room gets that particular chill along the floor.

And the thought comes, the way it has been coming since about November.

It is the same with the other thing.

She does not say the word soul, even in her head, because it sounds like something off a program. But that is what she means. There was a time she got up at five and read for an hour and sang in the kitchen while the pan heated. There was a time when things came to her. She led a class of women for twenty two years and had something to say to every one of them, and she meant it, and it was not manufactured.

Now she wakes in a chair. She reads a little and it goes in and does not stay. She prays and it is mostly a list of names and then nothing. Nobody would know. She is seventy eight and everybody assumes seventy eight is quiet.

She thinks the fire is going out because she can no longer lift what it takes to feed it. She thinks that is what has been happening since November and that it will just keep on that way.

Cyrus comes on Saturday. Today is Thursday.

She pulls the blanket up and looks at the gray skin over the red, and under it, if you were close enough to see, the coal is still going.

Nobody in Leviticus ever lit that fire

There is a line about a fire in the middle of a book most people skip, and it has been quoted at tired believers for a long time in a way that puts the whole weight on them.

The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.Leviticus 6:13

Read it as it stands and you will notice something odd about the grammar. It is not an instruction to the fire and it is not really an instruction to a man. It is a flat statement about what is going to be true of that fire. It shall never go out.

And now go back one chapter and a bit, to where the fire came from in the first place, because that is the part nobody quotes.

No priest lit it. Nobody struck anything. Fire came out from before the Lord and fell on the altar, and the whole crowd fell on their faces at the sight of it, and every fire on that altar from then on was that fire, kept alive, never re-kindled by a man.

So when the command comes to keep it burning, it is a command about a fire that a man could not have started if he had worked at it all year. The priests were never the source. They were never even close to being the source. They were people who lived near a fire that God had lit and God had guaranteed.

You are living beside a fire you did not light, and its going out was never on your wrists. Leviticus 6:13 has been sitting there for three thousand years saying so, and the Holy Spirit is not too grand to read an old line like that to a woman in a back room in February.

And look at what the priest actually did in the morning, since we are here. He laid wood on it. That is the whole of the duty in the text. He put on what was to hand, in the ordinary early hours, and he did not fan it and he did not carry it and he was not asked to produce heat out of himself.

An empty season is not a fire going out

Here is the thing you have quietly concluded, and I want to say it out loud so it can be looked at.

You have concluded that because the feeling went, the fire went. Because you no longer wake at five with something rising in you, because the reading goes in and does not stay, because prayer has become a list of names and then a long quiet.

That conclusion is not in Scripture anywhere. It came from somewhere else and it has been sitting in your chest since November with nobody to contradict it.

You have the same fire this morning that you had in the kitchen at five o'clock in nineteen seventy nine. That is the written word and not my comfort, kept in Leviticus 6:13 in the plainest terms it could have used, and His Spirit is the one who keeps it going while you sleep in a chair with a blanket over your knees.

Sleeping in the chair is not a lapse. I want to be careful here, because you have been counting it as one. A body at seventy eight that sleeps in the warm at seven in the morning is a body doing what bodies do, and the rest is not a dimming and never was. Nothing in that verse makes the fire a report card on your alertness.

And I am not going to tell you when the feeling comes back. Nobody can, and anybody who puts a date on it is selling something. What I can tell you is what the fire is running on, and it was never running on the feeling, which is why the feeling could go without taking anything with it.

You were never the source, and that is why an empty season cannot bankrupt you. Scripture puts the lighting in God's hands from the fire that fell on the altar to the light He shone in our hearts, and what the Spirit adds is that this is about you, personally, in the chair you are in right now.