On Fire

I’ve been thinking of a song all day today. “On Fire,” by Switchfoot.

It’s a beautiful song, and one of those ballads you could easily take as either about a relationship between a man and woman, or between a believer and God. Jenny and I heard it at the first concert we went to as a couple, back in 2008. Before I go any further, just listen:

This is actually from the very show we attended:

I love the song, and when I hear it I think of falling for Jen, long before we were planning to get married.

“But everything inside you
Knows there’s more than what you’ve heard
There’s so much more than empty conversations
Filled with empty words”

I’d spent so much time talking to different women. Some I wanted to be involved with and never got to be. Some I shouldn’t have been involved with, but was. It wasn’t until I started spending time with Jen that I knew what it could really be like to have God in common in a relationship—to have Him mean the same thing to each person..

Things change when that happens.

“There’s so much more than empty conversations
Filled with empty words”

I discovered that when Jen and I started talking, and I will be ever grateful she sent me that first email. It changed my life in every way a life can be changed.

Today, though, I was thinking about the song in a different way, and the part that kept repeating in my head was this:

“Give me one more time around
Give me one more chance to see
Give me everything you are
Give me one more chance to be near you

When everything inside me looks like everything I hate
You are the hope I have for change
You are the only chance I’ll take”

Today, I was thinking about God when the song was playing in my head, and the funny thing is, I didn’t even listen to the actual song today until I typed this sentence.

I’ve been feeble and inconsistent in my devotional life, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I was having difficulty.

I’ve been feeble and inconsistent in my prayer life as well, and that is perhaps worst of all.

Perhaps as a result of both of these things, I’ve been down on myself tremendously of late. Mainly, this has been because I feel like I’ve been epic failing in my ministry commitments at church, and questioning whether or not my current involvement in Youth Ministry is even where I’m supposed to be involved.

I’ve been really giving myself a ration of crap.

So today I found myself singing quietly to God:

Give me one more time around
Give me one more chance to see
Give me everything you are
Give me one more chance to be near you

When everything inside me looks like everything I hate
You are the hope I have for change
You are the only chance I’ll take

And I also began to think about how easy it is to start looking at ourselves as piles of garbage—piles of crap.

Our enemy wants us to have these sorts of images of ourselves, and the opposite is true.

We were not created worthlessly, no matter the circumstances of our births.

We were not created to offer weak prayers and insincere pledges of fealty to God based on what we think our needs are.

We were made not as piles of excrement or garbage, no matter what our erroneous self-images may tell us.

We were made in His image, and meant to offer Him our most sincere prayers—and our hearts—and to cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

This is my prayer—that I find that ability within myself, and also the ability to tune out the things and negative thoughts that help no one, least of all myself.

So that When everything inside me looks like everything I hate, I will be able to remember what I am actually worth to my God.