I Smell Smoke: Burn, Baby, Burn

There is something especially powerful in the realization that the friction I have been begging God to remove may actually be evidence that something is finally catching. Not every uncomfortable thing in my life is an attack to escape. Some of it is God refusing to let me remain optically impressive but functionally fragile.

I know fire.

I was born and raised in Southern California. Fire is not some cute little metaphor to me. I know what it means to smell smoke before you ever see flames. I know how quickly something seemingly contained can spread. I know the seriousness of dry conditions, wind, fuel, evacuation routes and watching the horizon because somewhere, something is burning.

So when I say I smell smoke in my life right now, I mean it.

Something is burning.

For a while, I assumed that meant everything was falling apart.

Now I am starting to wonder if some things are finally catching fire.

Matthew 3:11 has been sitting differently with me. John the Baptist says, “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

John understood something I desperately need to understand: my assignment is not something I manufacture. John knew exactly who he was because he also knew exactly who he was not.

Later, in John 3:28–30, he says plainly, “I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him,” before giving the sentence that absolutely murders my ego: “He must become greater; I must become less.”

Whew.

Because sometimes I want God to reveal my purpose when what I really mean is, “God, please approve the purpose I already picked.”

I want confirmation more than submission.

I want God to bless the version of my life that makes sense to me, fits my gifts, protects my feelings and preferably does not require carrying anything heavy.

Meanwhile, Jesus is over there talking about crosses.

Apparently Heaven did not receive my request for the ergonomic version.

I do not pick my purpose. I discover it, and then I submit to it.

That requires enough intimacy with God to distinguish His voice from my own desires. Because I am learning that my biggest problem is not always whether I can trust what God is saying.

Sometimes I cannot trust what I am interpreting.

My heart is a filter.

If that filter is clogged with fear, disappointment, rejection, exhaustion, unmet expectations, old wounds and the memory of what happened the last time I trusted somebody, I can hear something true and interpret it through something wounded.

That realization has been bloody for me.

Because I have spent a lot of time treating symptoms.

I hurt emotionally, so I assume my emotions are the problem.

Something goes wrong externally, so I assume the external thing is the problem.

My finances hurt. My relationships hurt. My expectations hurt. My plans hurt. My feelings hurt. My circumstances become uncomfortable, and suddenly I am running around my spiritual house with a fire extinguisher spraying everything that makes me uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, the weakness may be somewhere completely different.

Job taught me that.

The enemy attacked Job externally, but the desired outcome was internal.

Touch the resources.

Touch the family.

Touch the body.

Touch the comfort.

Touch everything surrounding him because maybe eventually what happens around him will alter what he believes within him.

The accusation was essentially that if enough external things were taken away, Job’s internal posture toward God would change.

That scares me because I can see the strategy in my own life.

The enemy does not necessarily need my circumstances to destroy me if he can use my circumstances to distort how I see God.

He can use what happened to me to alter what I believe about Him.

He can use disappointment to make me suspicious of His goodness.

He can use delay to make me question His faithfulness.

He can use loneliness to make me question His presence.

He can use frustration to make me question my assignment.

He can use exhaustion to make quitting look like discernment.

That last one? Yeah.

Blood everywhere.

Because I have been going through it.

I do not need to explain everything that has happened for that sentence to be true. There have been moments when I genuinely wondered how much more emotional weight I could carry without something in me breaking.

Then God started showing me something I did not particularly appreciate at first:

I have spent too much time chasing pain instead of strengthening what pain keeps exposing.

I have been trying to make everything around me better so I can finally become better inside.

God has been reversing the order.

When I get healthier spiritually, everything does not magically get fixed.

I get fixed.

That matters because a healthier me can stand in the middle of something broken without allowing it to break me.

That is the difference.

I have been optically impressive but functionally fragile.

Whew.

That sentence hurts.

Because optics can fool everybody, including me.

I can look disciplined and still be internally dependent on approval.

I can quote Scripture and still catastrophize when life stops cooperating.

I can write about faith and still panic when God asks me to actually use mine.

I can understand boundaries intellectually and still feel guilty enforcing them.

I can know God is good and still interpret His silence as rejection.

I can have enough spiritual vocabulary to explain the fire while secretly being terrified of getting burned.

Cute exterior. Fragile infrastructure.

Basically spiritually Elle Woods walking into Harvard like, “What, like it’s hard?”

Except, ma’am.

It is hard.

The difference is that Elle eventually had to discover that she could not build her identity around Warner choosing her. What started as chasing somebody else became the environment where she discovered something about herself.

Maybe isolation has been doing something similar to me.

I have spent too much time living off other people’s fire.

Their revelation.

Their reassurance.

Their validation.

Their prayers.

Their faith.

Their ability to hear God clearly when I cannot.

Their confidence when mine is on life support.

None of those things are bad. Community is biblical. Counsel is necessary. People matter deeply.

Codependency is different.

I cannot spend my life standing close enough to somebody else’s fire to stay warm.

At some point, my house has to catch.

And maybe that is why God allowed some isolation.

Not abandonment.

Isolation.

Because when everybody else’s fire gets far enough away, I finally discover whether I know how to burn.

I have begged God to put out some of the friction in this season, and now I am realizing:

The friction is producing heat.

The heat is producing fire.

The fire is producing light.

And the light is showing me things I could not see before.

This is fire.

Scripture repeatedly uses fire in connection with God’s presence, purification and holy activity. Moses encounters God in a bush that burns without being consumed in Exodus 3. God’s presence leads Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire in Exodus 13. Fire falls on the sacrifice in 1 Kings 18. Malachi 3 describes God with the imagery of a refiner’s fire. Acts 2 describes what appeared to be tongues of fire as the Holy Spirit came upon the believers.

Fire illuminates.

Fire purifies.

Fire consumes.

Fire also requires fuel.

That part has me checking what I keep pouring into myself.

Because not everything poured on me is fuel.

Some things feed the fire.

Some things extinguish it.

What am I consuming?

Who am I listening to?

What conversations am I repeatedly entertaining?

What am I rehearsing in my mind?

What do I run to when I am scared?

What gets more access to my internal world than God’s Word does?

Who keeps pouring water on something God is trying to ignite?

I have to become discerning about fuel.

Prayer is fuel.

Worship is fuel.

Scripture is fuel.

Obedience is fuel.

Intentional intimacy with God is fuel.

Constant fear is not.

Other people’s dysfunction is not.

My obsession with controlling outcomes is not.

Replaying every painful possibility until my nervous system thinks it has personally survived all 47 imaginary scenarios is definitely not.

I cannot ask God for fire while continuously soaking myself in things designed to extinguish it.

Because intimacy requires intentionality.

I cannot accidentally develop a deep relationship with God.

I cannot keep giving Him whatever emotional scraps remain after I have spent the entire day feeding anxiety, fixing everybody, analyzing circumstances and carrying things He never assigned me to carry, then wonder why I feel spiritually cold.

This season is friction.

I finally see it.

The enemy thought the external pressure would get inside me.

Maybe he thought if enough happened around me, something within me would finally curse the God I have spent years saying I trust.

Maybe he thought disappointment would make me abandon my assignment.

Maybe he thought exhaustion would make me surrender my identity.

Maybe he thought isolation would extinguish me.

Except isolation put me alone with the Match.

Now there is smoke.

And I know smoke.

Smoke means something has caught.

God is setting my house on fire.

Not to destroy me.

To consume what keeps trying to destroy me.

Fire consumes what gets close enough.

So there are things that cannot continue approaching the version of me God is developing because they will not survive the heat.

Some patterns cannot survive here.

Some dependencies cannot survive here.

Some misplaced identities cannot survive here.

Some desperate need to be understood cannot survive here.

Some interpretations of God built from my trauma instead of His character cannot survive here.

Some purposes I stole because they looked better than the cross assigned to me cannot survive here.

John knew that.

“He must become greater; I must become less.”

Maybe becoming less is not God diminishing me.

Maybe it is God burning away everything I accumulated trying to become somebody He never asked me to be.

I smell smoke.

For once, I am not running.

I am not calling the fire department.

I am not asking God to extinguish every uncomfortable thing just because it produces heat.

I am asking Him to teach me what is fire and what is destruction. What is friction and what is danger. What is fuel and what is water. What needs my attention and what is merely trying to distract me from what He is doing internally.

Because the enemy has spent enough time trying to use external things to rearrange my internal world.

Breaking season is over.

If God is strengthening me internally, the next external blow does not get to determine who I become.

I may still cry.

I may still hurt.

I may still have days when my faith feels considerably less like “woman of God” and considerably more like Elle Woods arriving at Harvard with a tiny dog and absolutely no idea what she has gotten herself into.

Still, I know where I am.

I know whose I am.

I am learning my assignment.

I am learning my fire.

Most importantly, I am learning that I do not need to borrow somebody else’s flame to prove that God lives here.

So yes.

I smell smoke.

There is a reason.

My house is on fire.