“Then you call on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire, He is God.” And all the people said, “That is a good idea.” (1 Kings 18:24, The Bible)
We turn to God when our foundations are shaking, only to find that it is God who is shaking them. (West)
There are some angels whose only job is to make sure we don’t get too comfortable, and fall asleep and miss our lives. (Andreas)
As a teenage camp counselor at a small Christian camp in the mountains of southwest Virginia, I would sit entranced as, every Friday evening at the closing campfire service for that week of camp, we were visited by fire from heaven.
“Oh, Baal, hear us!” the camp director, a huge Goliath of a man, would bellow through the dark mountain night, and there would not be a sound from the 100 campers and staff who sat on rough wooden benches around the campfire. “Hear us and send fire!”
And of course, true to the story of Elijah in the Bible, the ole god Baal would let his followers down by not sending even a spark. Then, according to the scriptures, the prophet Elijah wettened down the altar and demanded fire from heaven from the “true” God. Every week, with perfect timing, as the director Uncle John demanded “fire from heaven” from God, a huge fireball would descend and with an explosion that would rock the benches on which the campers sat, the huge campfire would burst into flame.
Startling and dramatic to say the least.
As staff, we would have spent the day preparing for the fire by chopping and lugging in wood from the surrounding mountains to build the gigantic campfire. The wood would then be saturated with oil, and a wire would be rigged up to a tree above. In the tree, a rag saturated with oil would be placed, and at the precise place in Uncle John’s talk where he asked God to send fire, he would press a switch and an electrical charge would ignite the rag, which would then whiz down the wire and light the fire with a huge Ka-Boom.
No matter how often I participated, I was always thrilled, and the gasps and screams and oohs and ahs of the campers were always satisfying, and worth every log we’d carried.
Now, almost sixty years later, I think with gratitude of all the times the Powers That Be lit a fire under my butt to wake me up and get me moving. I was always startled, and often scared, but it always worked.
Apathy and lethargy are twin gods that can keep us stagnant, stuck, unconscious . . . Baal-like, maybe. No movement there, not a spark.
Ah, to have the guts to request a little “heavenly fire” . . .