Hearth Lessons

I feel like every year as I contemplate our woodstove, it gives not just warmth but insight--and most oftenest, something to do with love: marriage, faith, family. It's no coincidence that the ancients worshiped Hestia, goddess of the hearth.
This morning, we came downstairs to a smolder rather than a flame. Ryan had tried multiple times to get it going before he left, Lord bless him, but was unsuccessful. My rather half-hearted efforts, sandwiched between breakfast and diapers, were likewise. Later on, feeling the effects of this grey day, I went to have another go at it. I was expecting to shove some more kindling in there, light it up, and poke at it a bit. Surprise! those not-insignificantly sized logs, while resisting the flame, had been slowly smoldering all day long, wasting away without producing any beauty or heat.
You see where I'm going with this, right?
Because our modern world praises "smoldering". Folks get real excited about it: her eyes were smoldering with passion | his gaze smoldered with intensity | that dance smolders with . . . in fact, if you want to quit smoking, you can even get your electronic cigarette and go smolder instead.
Smolder.
Smoooooolder.
But you know what smoldering does? It produces no real heat. It is not beautiful to watch. It burns you up until you're nothing but smoke and ashes, covering everything around it with a black filth. Perhaps it seems safer, more attractive, because it seems not to demand a full commitment. But it will consume you, all the same, from the inside out.
Fire demands an outright total sacrifice of self. Love allows for no holding back: not of mind, heart, goals, finances, fertility, whatever. And that doesn't mean you give way to the other, necessarily, but that you become one. Fire makes all things one. And it gives, in return, beauty, warmth, and light for the flourishing of home and family.
So whatever you're going to do, don't be content with an ugly, half-hearted smolder. Allow yourself to burn, for all the world to see. Give it your all. Live your vocation, your calling, with all you have to give. And you will be a light for all to see.
Be who you were meant to be, and you will set the whole world on fire.