We All, With Unveiled Faces

God, let your fire

fall down on us

I, starting up, the light did spy,

And to my God my heart did cry

To strengthen me in my distress

And not to leave me succourless.

Then, coming out, beheld a space

The flame consume my dwelling place.

--Anne Bradstreet,

“Upon the Burning of Our House”

Each one’s work will become manifest,

for the Day will disclose it,

because it will be revealed by fire,

and the fire will test

what sort of work each has done.

--1 Corinthians 3:13 (ESV)

I begin with fire.

Our year begins with fire.

Fire: who can describe it? Its colors, the flames. Its purifying, cleansing, refining.

And how it licks up everything in sight and there’s no stopping it.

No, there’s nothing you can do but watch everything burn.

Just leave it all there, leave everything in the heat. In that burning heat, so hot you feel it wants to sear your skin, your face right off.

That smoke, so thick and so black it chokes, and you suffocate for air, lungs screaming for air.

No, at that moment, you have to drop everything, leave everything in the flame, in the smoke, and get out of there.

Get out of there and get somewhere you can breathe, where it’s safe, and then you turn, and you look, and you watch everything burn.

It’s the watching that makes me weep.

And this year, this year would be a year to watch everything burn.

A year to watch everything be licked up in flames right before my eyes, and there it would burn, right in front of me, for me to see.

You just turn and watch it all be engulfed, consumed in front of you. And you just stand there still, and you can’t do anything.

But I don’t just stand there still.

I did do something.

I couldn’t just stand there.

Not with the flames rising and the smoke billowing and the people still inside.

The people. They’re still inside.

Souls, eternal souls, are still inside.

And hasn’t anyone told them the building’s on fire?

In that moment when the flames are too hot and the smoke is too thick and it’s black—it’s too black—you have to get out.

And you know every second counts.

In that moment we can’t even get past the door three feet, and we know there’s no going in further, that we have to turn back. There was no stopping those flames.

It’s in that moment that you have to decide. And every decision counts.

My apartment, next to hers, directly across from hers. Hers, the apartment melting, licked up in flames.

We have a few minutes.

My apartment door is open—the soot travels inside, layering the floor. I think fast, making a decision. I grab my North Face backpack, the olive green one I carried everyday across the Auburn University campus, the one I carried inside coffee shops, the one I hike with.

The one I carried through that Atlanta airport as I waved goodbye to them, flew altitudes over 20,000 feet to LA to Hongkong to Beijing, to eventually arrive in Harbin.

I grab that backpack with the straps I pull ever tighter and closer against my back every day in the painful, growing awareness that I don’t belong here. That I am stranger, sojourner, exile, a wanderer of this earth.

Constantly wandering, never at rest until I’m home.

I tear open a closet, grabbing, throwing in there.

I don’t remember if I even grabbed my toothbrush.

I grab my Word, His Word—can’t leave here without this Word. I grab my journal and a bandana—like we were just going on a camping trip. These I keep on hand for adventures. I grab my wallet, my passport.

I pull those straps tight and I turned and went.

I can’t say I am caught off guard.

In a way, I knew. I knew it would happen.

He had told me it would.

The night before, I was restless. The mold in my new apartment bedroom had me sleeping on my living room couch until we could get it cleaned.

Outer lights glared, and China street noises filled my makeshift bedroom. It must have been midnight.

Suddenly, His presence thunders me awake.

And I mean I was wide-awake.

Energy bolted through me. I shot straight up.

“What is it, Lord?” I silently pleaded with Him, listening. “Tell me. What?” I was just beginning to learn Him this way, this new way He communicated with me.

As I listened, I faintly thought I heard my teammate across the hall from me crying out for help.

I was so sure, so convinced I had heard her, that I stood and opened my door to check on her. But when I opened, I heard nothing.

All was silent, sleeping.

I didn’t understand.

“What did I hear, Lord? What is it?”

I was so sure I’d heard her. I pressed my ear up firmly to her door to listen. And I listened. Hard.

Nothing. Only silence, only stillness.

I just stood there dumbfounded in the middle of the hallway.

It was midnight-something. We were at the edge of the hall. A motion-sensor bulb flickered awake above my head, dimly glowing only seconds.