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There’s a fire, there’s a fire starting over here
Do you ever hear the wailing of an ambulance, sometimes in the middle of the night when you’re trying to fight off sleep in order to finish that paper you’ve kept to the last minute?
Or have you ever been made to stand in the cold at night while firemen walk into your building looking like they bear the weight of the world on their shoulders, only for them to come out saying it was a false alarm?
If any of these things have happened to you then you know how annoying it is when people make a big fuss about something that turns out to be nothing.
As an extremely nerdy kid, I remember reading a book called ‘No Smoke without Fire’. While I don’t remember the gritty details of the crime novel, the title stuck with me. Fire is usually what comes next when smoke engulfs a room. Sometimes we see the fire first and sometimes we see the smoke, but the one thing we know for sure is that both are star-crossed lovers, who have an epic love story and eventually die together. But the problem with using that analogy in real life is that it presents an error in judgment because we begin to associate one with the other in every situation when today, the smoke we see is most often likened to the proverbial man who cried wolf.
Today, we see a lot of smoke, ones that are a potent enough to fog up massive rooms but when it eventually clears out we discover a fire that has long died. In most cases, we discover a fire that never even got started. False fire alarms are the most frustrating things on earth, simply because your mind and body go through different stages of panic. Your system gets bursts of adrenaline, which enables you to do things you wouldn’t normally do on any given day. Now imagine going full hulk when the alarms go off, only to get out of the building and find everyone chilling while your heart rate has reached peak levels, then the fire men coming out of the supposedly burning building casually, saying in a deep voice (because for some reason all fire men have deep voices in my head) ‘false alarm! the elevators won’t run for another five minutes’. Not only do you have to get calm enough to become your quiet and saved but constantly being tested Bruce Banner self again, you have to do a mini work out just to get back to the comfort of your bed on the twenty second floor. While I’m not saying this because I’m mad that this happened to me, false alarms get you hyped up for lack of a better term, and then disappointed.
People usually have two reactions to getting disappointed in this way, the common reaction though being some form of anger which is expressed in one way or the other.
In my case (if I did it) writing a strongly worded letter to the management expressing my disappointment, or in this case introducing that story to this article but I digress. People usually get angry and never trust any form of alarms/warnings again or they get really mad but go back to trusting. The problem with crying wolf every time is the fact that people eventually stop believing you.
I guess what I’m actually trying to say is that everyone has probably experienced false fire alarms in your journey of salvation, many people saying they carry the fire of God only to disappoint you when it’s time to demonstrate. We’ve probably seen a bunch of people going somewhere because they have been enticed by smoke only for you to get there and there isn’t any fire. Or worse still, we’ve all experienced places where the focus is on the generation of a thick blanket of smoke to hide the fact that underneath it all lays a cold and empty furnace which probably hasn’t been used for years.
But what happens when you get to a place with a lot of smoke and surprise, surprise, a fire that never seems to go down, that even when the smoke clears out you still feel the unbearable heat because that fire is something that has no intention of going out
We are more than a church; we are a movement. A rebellion that has no intention of being stopped. Campus rush, we are not raising false alarms, there really is a fire that was started and is still burning over here.
