"Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering
and placed it on his son Isaac,
and he himself carried the fire and the knife..."
Genesis 22:6Have you ever stopped and read this carefully? Never before did I think about what it meant for Abraham to carry the fire. That was until I moved to Toposaland where Toposa carry fire ALL THE TIME.
This week, I am telling the story of Abraham and his obedience to God, as he goes to sacrifice his son Isaac because God told him to do so, with our storying groups. The phrase, "carried the fire," grabbed my attention, because, you see,
the Toposa carry fire.
From a house to the house next door to the garden to the cattle camp. From cattle camp back to the village to the first wife who gives it to the second wife who lets the first son take it back to cattle camp. Finally, from cattle camp it finds it's way by Toposa hands all the way back to the house where it all started.
They carry fire for two reasons. To light or cook something they have, to light or cook something for someone else. To start a fire for themselves or for someone else. And the thing is...most of them do not start their own fires. But when the spark from the small, hot, on-fire piece of wood in their hands hits a piece of tobacco (in a pipe) or another piece of wood: WHOOSH. Fire.
That got me thinking about the storying we are doing right now. We are kind of doing what Abraham did. We are carrying fire. A fire that someone lit inside of each of us on the team years ago when we first heard the true stories from God's Word. And we are passing it on to the Toposa. One by one by one. As the Toposa would say, "Logeilogei. Slowly, slowly."
On another note, that actually ends up being quite the same, I was teaching four-year-old Walker the other morning. We were sorting little blocks by shape and then by color and then ended up playing army men with blocks. Next, I randomly had the idea to line them up like dominoes! We did, and it worked! Walker loves dominoes so we spent time doing that too.
Later that day God brought the pieces together in my head. The dominoes are just like the Toposa and their fire. The red square hits the blue star which knocks over the green circle that nearly touches the yellow diamond which pushes over the purple square and finally tips over a second red square.
When my siblings and I were little, we would spend hours building domino mazes and the best ending was when the final domino crashed into or fell on or hit a cooking pot: CLANG! Dominoes finish. The thing with dominoes is that they do always finish;
Dominoes always knock over the next one.
Fire lights up. Dominoes knock down. They do it in different ways, but the method of transference is exactly the same. It is a passing on from one to the next to the next to the next.
And like I mentioned earlier, as I share stories from God's Word, as my team shares, we are carrying fire, or we are, ourselves, tipping dominoes reaching out to the next one.
The hope we aim for is the glory of God, a raging and unquenchable bonfire and a trumpeting clang at the end of time. It begins with a spark. It begins with a push.
The sharing of the gospel is like carrying fire and being dominoes.
It keeps going.
Please pray for fires to be lit among those who hear God's Word. Pray for the turning of hearts toward Him. And pray that those who turn to God and call upon Him as their Lord would then go and carry the fire, and be that one domino, elsewhere and everywhere with the deepest desire of their hearts also being to pass on the light and to push others closer to Jesus.
