The Camp Fire You Cannot Feel Any More

There is a blanket in the airing cupboard, on the bottom shelf, folded in a way nobody folds a blanket now.

It came back from a field when you were fifteen and it has not been on a bed since. It smells faintly of smoke even after all the washes, or you think it does, which is nearly the same thing.

Because something happened in that field. Not a mood. Not the general excitement of being fifteen and away from home and slightly sunburnt. Something happened. Somebody prayed and the top of your head went warm and you cried in front of people you had to sit with at breakfast, and you knew, in the way you know your own name, that God was real and that He had come and stood beside you personally.

And then you came home.

Here is what nobody photographed. The next morning the field is cold. The fire ring is a circle of blackened stones with one log in it that burned halfway through and went out, and it is gray, and it is damp, and if you put your hand near it there is nothing coming off it at all. The minibus is being loaded. Somebody is looking for a lost sock. The whole field looks like an ordinary field, because it is one.

That morning is the one you have been living in ever since, and you did not notice it happening. Twenty five years of a cold ring of stones. You have gone to the meetings and stood in the rows and put your hands up and waited for the top of your head to go warm again, and it has not, and you have been quietly working out what that means about you.

So let me put the fire ring down for a minute and show you something else, from a very long time before either of us.

There is a man standing on ground that has only just stopped being underwater. Everything smells of mud. The animals are going off in every direction. He builds something out of rough stones, and smoke goes up, and God speaks and makes a promise so enormous that it covers every creature and every generation and every person who would ever stand on that ground afterwards.

And then God does something with the promise. He hangs a sign for it.

He puts a bow in the cloud. And listen to the reason He gives, because it is not the reason anybody expects. He does not say: this is so that you remember. He says, when the bow is in the clouds, I will look at it and remember the covenant.

The sign was not hung in the man's chest. It was hung where God looks.

You have been treating one night in a field as your sign, and checking the temperature of your own heart for twenty five years to see whether it is still valid. It was never your sign. You had a real night, and I am not going to take it off you, but the thing that holds you was never located in the part of you that gets cold.

The sign is hung where He looks

Take the picture apart slowly, because this is the whole article.

A covenant in the ancient world came with a sign attached to it. Not decoration and not a souvenir. The sign was a standing, visible, public thing that said the oath is still in force, and it was deliberately something outside the two parties, because the inside of a person is weather and nobody builds on weather.

So the bow goes in the sky. Not in a feeling, not in a memory, not in the strength of anybody's recall on a wet Tuesday in February. In the sky, in the open, where the One who swore it looks up and sees it.

You are held by something hung outside you, and you were held by it on every single day you felt nothing at all. That is not me being kind about your dry decade: Genesis 9:16 has God saying that when He sees the bow He remembers, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking a sentence about weather and putting it under a person who has been checking their own temperature since they were fifteen.

A seal is not a feeling

Now the second picture, and it is the one Scripture actually uses about you.

Think of hot wax on a folded document, and a ring pressed into it. The wax is warm for about ninety seconds. Then it goes hard and cold, and it stays cold for the whole journey, in a bag, on a ship, in the dark. And the seal is not less of a seal for being cold. The seal was never the heat. The seal is the shape the ring left, and the shape is what tells anyone who handles that document who it belongs to and that it has not been opened by anybody else.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.Ephesians 1:13

You were sealed. Past tense, done, a thing that was performed on you rather than achieved by you, and the sealing was not the warmth on the top of your head; it was the ring going into the wax while the wax happened to be warm. Ephesians 1:13 says it plainly, and the Spirit who is named there as the seal is the same Spirit who has been in you through every cold morning since.

And now the part that has to be said out loud, because a lot of people are quietly bleeding over it. There are believers who have never had a night in a field. No warm head, no tears at a fire, nothing to file under the word encounter. They were sealed on an ordinary afternoon with nothing happening in their body whatsoever, and they are not one gram less inside this than the person with the story.

Nothing here is asking you to go and reproduce that night. There is no ritual to perform, no arrangement of hands, no particular meeting to get to, no formula that gets the temperature back. The sign was given. Signs do not need re-earning; that is what makes them signs.