Singing in the Fire

While busy with custodial duties at church, I was listening to a talk by Britt Merrick, pastor of Reality Carpinteria.  He spoke from experience about how joy and suffering are coupled in the Christian life.  Instead of God removing suffering from life, He allows Christians to embrace genuine joy in the midst of suffering.  Just yesterday I finished reading a biography of Mrs. Spurgeon by Charles Ray.  Susannah was a godly woman who not only endured suffering, but continued to persevere and be profitable for God's glory in the midst of acute long-term illness.  She was a woman of maturity and faith, one who learned to trust in God no matter what.  In the book, there is an object lesson she shares which spoke deeply to my heart.  Ray begins this quote from Susannah on page 81:

At the close of a very dark and gloomy day I lay resting on my couch as the deeper night drew on, and though all was bright within my cosy little room, some of the external darkness seemed to have entered into my soul and obscured its spiritual vision.  Vainly I tried to see the hand which I knew held mine and guided my fog-enveloped feet along a steep and slippery path of suffering.  In sorrow of heart I asked, 'Why does my Lord thus deal with His child?  Why does He so often send sharp and bitter pain to visit me?  Why does he permit lingering weakness to hinder the sweet service I long to render to His poor servants?'  These fretful questions were quickly answered, and though in a strange language, no interpreter was needed save the conscious whisper of my own heart.

For a while silence reigned in the little room, broken only by the crackling of an oak log burning on the hearth.  Suddenly I heard a sweet, soft sound, a little, clear, musical note, like the tender trill of a robin beneath my window.  'What can it be?' I said to my companion, who was dozing in the firelight; 'surely no bird can be singing out there at this time of the year and night!'  We listened, and again heard the faint plaintive notes, so sweet, so melodious, yet mysterious enough to provoke for a moment our undisguised wonder.  Presently my friend exclaimed, 'It comes from the log of the fire!' and we soon ascertained that her surprised assertion was correct.  The fire was letting loose the imprisoned music from the old oak's inmost heart.  Perchance he had garnered up this song in the days when all went well with him, when birds twittered merrily on his branches, and the soft sunlight flecked his tender leaves with gold; but he had grown old since then and hardened; ring after ring of knotting growth had sealed up the long-forgotten melody until the fierce tongues of the flames came to consume his callousness and the vehement heat of the fire wrung from him at once a song and a sacrifice.

Oh! thought I, when the fire of affliction draws songs of praise from us, then indeed are we purified and our God is glorified!  Perhaps some of us are like this old oak log - cold, hard and insensible; we should give forth no melodious sounds were it not for the fire which kindles round us, and releases tender notes of trust in Him, and cheerful compliance with His will.  As I mused the fire burned and my soul found sweet comfort in the parable so strangely set forth before me.  Singing in the fire!  Yes, God helping us if that is the only way to get harmony out of these hard, apathetic hearts, let the furnace be heated seven times hotter than before.

When God sees fit to refine us in the fire, may the Holy Spirit quicken us to praise Him!  May the joy of the LORD be our strength always!