Kindle Fire

Thursday 1/19/2012 5:06 AM

My faith’s vibrancy ebbs and flows with time.  Sometimes it seems as if God is walking next to me like a good friend and we converse regularly, enjoying each other's company.  At other times he seems distant at best or completely absent from my life.  I seem to be stuck in the nadir of this cycle lately and I feel as if I am suffering from spiritual neuropathy, a combination of numbness and pain.

My reading today includes the words of Jesus in John 6:63, “The words I have spoken to you – they are full of the Spirit and life.”  I have no doubt those words of Jesus are true but they certainly don’t seem to be so full of life to me this morning.  I would like to experience the life of the Spirit coursing through my body but, of late, there is nothing.

While I wrote the previous paragraph the screen on my Kindle went black, as the power-saving mode activated.  It would seem like a good portrayal of the way I feel about my life at the moment; the power has gone out and I seem to be walking in darkness.  As I looked at the screen it suddenly came to life with the words “Kindle Fire” glimmering on the screen.  After about thirty seconds there were the additional words “installing updates” underneath, with a progress bar slowly expanding as the programs to make my Kindle operate more efficiently were downloaded.  Eventually the progress bar disappeared but the words “Kindle Fire” remained on the screen for a couple more minutes while the internal programs were overwritten with the updates.

At first the words “Kindle Fire” seemed like an imperative to me, a kind of pick-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps command to kindle the fire of my faith.  That thought made me even more distraught since my efforts to do so have been unsuccessful.  But then I had the picture of the Spirit of God blowing on the dying embers of my faith, dropping a little pine straw on them in order to kindle a fire where there is but a dim glow.  I have a feeling that is the more accurate picture of the two.  Perhaps God is in the process of installing updates to make me, his child, more effective in the building of his kingdom.  It will be interesting to see what comes of it all.