Prescribed Fire

This post has been a long time coming. I began writing it back in May of 2023 following a cross country road trip for an internship. Over the course of three days, I covered over 1400 miles by car with fun stops planned along the way to enjoy the solo trip. At Hot Springs National Park on a short stroll of a hike, I noticed a sign that caught my eye. Through the day I contemplated its connections to my personal faith journey and the message of the Bible, which I’d like to share here for my first long form post in quite a while. The road trip, that summer away, and the return road trip three months later have all come and gone. I even wrote most of this at the end of that summer, and here I am now in 2024 writing, revising and reforming these thoughts again in the middle of huge life changes. I’m planning to finish my PhD this summer, I’m in the process of searching for my next career move, and I’m planning for a wedding after getting engaged just before this past Valentine’s Day (really, my fiancée is doing most of the planning and I’m just trying to help however I can – she’s amazing). In all of this, the lesson I began writing about nearly a year ago has remained in my mind, and I think God is still teaching it to me.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written on this blog – nearly three years since my last long form text post in the Armor of God series I’ve been writing, and since a poem I posted dealing with a similar vein of thought that today’s post will delve into. For those who know me personally, you know that these past three years have been full of growth and wrestling through a journey I never expected to go on. Part of that journey has included a reluctance or fear of writing here again, as I’ve had a hard time feeling like my thoughts were composed and theologically sound enough to share, or that they were worth sharing. As I’ve worked to write this post specifically, I’ve felt I had so much to say but no idea how to say it – as evidenced by this post’s length, even though I tried cutting it shorter, and I still feel like I could turn this one topic into a whole book if I kept at it. Writing this post is, in a way, some personal accountability for me to finally write the next piece of the Armor of God series about “feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace,” during which I’ll talk more about my personal journey of seeking to find peace in Christ when my life has certainly not been characterized by peace at times in these recent years. For now, though, let’s talk about a concept that may sound familiar to any other nature enthusiasts out there, and which caught my attention on my hike in Hot Springs National Park and several other times over the summer of 2023: prescribed fire. I pray that whoever else this message is meant for receives it and that God continues working this lesson out in my own heart.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the health of forests, but I certainly love walking through them. I grew up loving to climb trees at any chance I could, especially at my grandparents’ home where I scared my grandma more than once with how high I had climbed. I’d joyfully run through the 5-acre wooded property my family lived on, dodging trees and undergrowth, leaping over bushes and ducking under branches, imagining I was a character in the fantasy books I loved, fleeing from some unknown enemy or running towards a noble battle. To this day, a hike through a dense forest puts my heart at ease, and I love to just stop and listen to the wildlife or the wind blowing through the trees, smelling clean air and seeing new growth, especially during spring. Living in an urban environment now, I always say that my favorite time of year is when I first notice on my morning bike commute that the trees on my university campus are bright green again after the winter.

Field trips to a nearby State Park taught my elementary school class about how fire can be used as a tool to help keep forests healthy. Portions of the forest area would be burned periodically to remove dead or invasive growth and allow new life to grow. Sometimes we’d even see evidence of it in the park, where vast areas were charred and appeared barren aside from a few remaining trees, but we were reassured that fresh new life would soon come again. So, when I saw the sign pictured above in Hot Springs National Park (which I’ll abbreviate as HSNP), I was already familiar with the concept and had known about it since my youth. This time, something about the phrase “prescribed fire” struck me in a new way as a model for how God moves in our hearts and in the hearts of His people throughout the stories in the Bible. I’ll note that this connection is not a new one – search “controlled burn” or “prescribed fire” with keywords about the Bible online and you’ll find plenty of articles discussing the same topic, but I’ll look to write from my own perspective about what I believe God has been impressing in my heart. I also encourage you to zoom in on the photo above to learn more from the text on the sign.

Fire in both the literal and metaphorical sense is used throughout the Bible in a variety of contexts. These include:

• God’s presence appearing as fire, as in the burning bush in Exodus 3, the coming of the Holy Spirit as “tongues of fire” in Acts 2:3, or God leading the Israelites through the desert as a cloud by day and a fire by night in Exodus 13:21, among many other examples.
• Fires of judgement, including John 15:6, Jude 7, and Revelation 20:14.
• Fire as a source of purification, testing and refining, explicitly in Isaiah 1:25, 4:4, 48:10; Malachi 3:2-3; 1 Corinthians 3:13; and implicitly in many other places especially in metaphors about removing impurities from silver or gold.

Without going too deep into all of the uses of fire in the Bible, what was impressed on me related to the “prescribed fire” sign in HSNP  is what fire does for refinement and as a representation of the presence of God.

The sign refers to fire being a tool to “kill actively growing non-native plants while natives are lying dormant. The result is reduction of invading species while creating an environment in which native plants can thrive.” Reducing the undergrowth of the forest helps prevent resource competition and allows for the ecosystem to continue to grow, in spite of the negative short-term effects the fire can bring like a bit of charred bark on the trees. There are even some trees which require fire to germinate, including the mighty giant sequoia.

As I saw this sign I was struck by this analogy in my own life. It certainly feels like there are a lot of weeds or undergrowth that can distract me or create an unhealthy spiritual journey in my life, whether it be struggles with anxiety, stresses over finances or the future, battles with sin, mental battles of feeling like I’m never doing enough or that I need to work my way to God somehow (the exact opposite of the Gospel), or even patterns or habits which waste the time that God has given me to steward. As I walked through HSNP, I dwelled on the idea that there are areas of my life where non-native growth still exists, and that God was and is in the process of removing them through a prescribed burning away of things that aren’t of Him. He does this in us so that, like the sign says, we can thrive in our walks with Him without other things fighting against our growth.

Scripture says that when anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), given a new self which is “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:24) and is continually “renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col 3:10). Paul describes beautifully in Romans 8 and in many other places in his writings that Christ fulfilled all of the requirements of God’s law in our place, and that when we are united with Christ through faith our old self (our flesh) is put to death (crucified, Rom. 6:6), empowering us to live in line with the Spirit of God. So, naturally, any desires or remnants that still remain of my flesh, the old parts of my human nature that don’t yet fully align with God, are parts that are not native to the new nature in the Spirit of God that I have been given. Our new nature is in a constant battle with our flesh, as Paul describes well in Romans 7:15-25 as he recognizes the war within himself.

These old ways, in reality, no longer have power over us, as Romans 8 calls us “more than conquerors” and no longer slaves to our flesh. However, when we aren’t “walking in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16-25, referring to living by the power of God in us), we can all-too-easily struggle to actually experience freedom from that “non-native growth” that distracts us from who God has made us to be.

A similar analogy is used in Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, talking specifically about seed (the Gospel) which is sown in various types of soil. One type of soil that is mentioned is soil with thorns in it, in which “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful” (Matthew 13). These thorns and bits of non-native growth in us – the desires and tendencies we have to sin and not walk in line with God – have to continually be put to death through remembering the identity Jesus has purchased for us. Colossians 3:5 says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” The way we get rid of these idols, impurities and desires within us that are not what God desires for us often comes through a sort of “prescribed fire,” a means of putting to death those particular thorns. Sometimes we intentionally light the fire through our own choices, other times our circumstances pull us into it. Either way, God walks with us through it.

Over the summer of 2023 when I experienced this thought process at first, I saw fire show up that burned hot in specific areas of my life. That summer was the hardest time I have been through in my life, ever, from a mental health perspective. Every day felt like a battle. While everything on the outside seemed perfect – a great new job, a cool new city to explore, a wonderful girlfriend (now fiancée) making time to FaceTime me from across the country, friends and family supporting me, and so on – the internal reality was that I was overwhelmed by anxiety and fear on a daily basis, sometimes cripplingly so. I wrestled with anxiety about my future and my career, questions about God’s calling and purpose on my life and if He even had one, how to handle certain challenging friendships, and how to fully submit my relationship before God given what I experienced in my last one. Every day I felt like there were voices battling in my head about which ways to go or not go, some speaking deceptive lies and others speaking what felt like truth, to the point that I didn’t know which way was up anymore and I couldn’t even focus on work most days without drowning out the fears with some meaningless podcast or other distraction. I cried more tears in prayer in the months surrounding that summer than I may have my whole life – all while every external circumstance in my life couldn’t have possibly been better. That summer felt like burning, not because of my external circumstances, but because of battles being waged in my mind.

Things got progressively better in the fall when I came back to grad school and spent time with my family, church community, friends and girlfriend. I’ve worked to keep pressing into God’s Word, and I’ve been incredibly thankful for the mentorship of spiritual leaders and others pouring out truth into my heart as I’ve opened up to them. These battles have continued to be up and down, though, as external stressors play a big role in anxiety in my life.

Now, I’m working to finish out research work and as I prepare to defend my thesis this summer; I proposed to my girlfriend by God’s grace and provision in February, and we’re in the middle of planning our wedding; I’m searching for jobs all over, wondering what the best next step may be for us together; and I’ve seen friends and family go through incredibly difficult seasons of their lives over this past year, where seeing their collective pain caused me to wrestle in tears with the grief in this world and what God is doing in the midst of it. I don’t have all of the answers yet, and there is still a lot I’m wrestling through as I’ve pressed into conversations with spiritual mentors and mental health counseling. What I know, though, is that in all this feeling of burning, I’ve seen my perspective and my desires steadily shift and I know that God has to be doing something in me through all of this as He works in areas of my life that need transformation. Lately, it’s been evident that even the specific anxieties I’ve dealt with have been used by God to move my heart and my convictions in the right direction towards Him – not that I believe that He causes anxiety, but He can certainly turn it around and use it for His good.

The thing about fire, whether the prescribed kind that a forest needs or the kind that we need to remove things in our life that are keeping us from experiencing God more deeply, is that it can hurt. It’s uncomfortable. It sometimes doesn’t make sense in our narrow perspective. But, man, do I continually need it.

Looking back at past hardships in my life, I can point to specific ways that a season or moment of prescribed fire helped to reveal something in me that needed to be changed. A past breakup revealed that I had been putting far too much stock into romantic relationships for my ultimate fulfillment and happiness, idolizing them over my relationship with God. This season of working to complete my PhD and wondering about where my next steps will be is quite similar to different circumstances in the past – I know that as I let go of my worry, God will open the right doors where they need to be opened and I can trust His provision for me. Difficulties in research or in relationships with coworkers and friends have revealed ways my pride had allowed my confidence in myself to inflate more than my confidence in God. Each day, as little tests and trials come in our lives, it’s like another thorn in the weeds gets burned away as God, the gardener and caretaker of our souls, does a new work as we take up our cross and follow Him (Matt. 16:24-26).

Romans 12:1 encourages Christians to offer their bodies (all that we are, our whole being) as a living sacrifice to God as an act of worship. This sacrificial language calls to mind the Old Testament’s sacrificial system, in which an animal or other offering of the harvest from the land would be burned on an altar as a sign of giving it over to God. In Mark 9:49-50, Jesus mentions that “everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt.” I love the Enduring Word commentary on this, which gives two interpretations of this verse. First, that just as sacrifices under the Old Testament law were burned and all required salt, so will every believer undergo trials which refine us (and we also know from Romans 5:3-5 that suffering produces perseverance, character and hope). Second, that as fire often symbolizes the Holy Spirit, His presence in our lives will season us, purify us, preserve us, and add flavor to our lives, making our “living sacrifice” acceptable to God.

In the midst of any present struggle, I know that God can use difficult situations to bring healing and growth beyond what I may see in the moment. Later on last summer after seeing the prescribed fire sign in HSNP, I took a solo trip to the Grand Canyon and saw a sign on the road into the southeast rim late at night which said to not call in to report fires in the area, because they were controlled burns by the National Park Service. I’m reminded even now not to fret when it feels like a fire is happening – God knows about the fire already, and sometimes it’s a prescribed fire God is using to do work He needs to do in me.

For you, God, tested us;
you refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison
and laid burdens on our backs.
You let people ride over our heads;
we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance.
Ps 66:10-12

Lord, I know that you are continually working in me to make me into Your image. There are far too many areas in my life where stubborn weeds and thorns hang on for too long. If and when the fires do come, give me the endurance to get through them with you carrying me. Give me the strength to stand up in the fires of this life when you are using them to do a good work in my heart. Make me more like you, make my heart into good soil for your Word to grow deeply and bear fruit so that others can see you through what you’ve done in me. Change my heart daily as only you can. When it hurts, I lean on you. I trust you. I surrender to your will for my life. Father, let my heart be after you.

Related music:

Train Song – Josh Garrels
Refiner’s Fire – Brian Doerksen
Good Things – Paul Russell
Good Ground – Citizens
Lighter Fluid – nobigdyl.
Glowing – The Oh Hellos
Anchor – Beautiful Eulogy + Josh Garrels
…There – Andy Mineo
Garden – NEEDTOBREATHE
Altar – Tekoa
Sagrada Familia – IMRSQD
Another in the Fire – Hillsong

Photos were taken by me at Hot Springs National Park, AR on May 18, 2023.