small fires, big hope
Happy it’s-not-January-anymore!
(Also known as February.)
Maybe you’ve noticed I’m now on substack. This allows me to offer a paid subscription option for this newsletter (which guarantees at least two essays a month, as well as my audio narrations so you can turn it up really loud and go wild washing the dishes). As always, my free subscription tier will remain and I’ll continue to publish an essay on the first of each month.
I’d like to start with an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s famous book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. What the world classifies as children’s books should probably just be called Books Your Kids Will Like Too—at least, the good children’s books, that is. (And, really, why would we raise our children on stories that aren’t, at the very least, good?) A good fairytale or kid’s story holds a truth, beauty, or particular lens on life that helps us first see better and therefore live better. C.S. Lewis, writing to his goddaughter about his book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, said,
“I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
With that in mind, I think we’re probably all now old enough to appreciate this encouragement from Lewis Carroll—
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; “One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Speaking about those who believe impossible things, this is one way to describe Winston Churchill’s role in the United Kingdom, and ultimately the entire Allied forces, as Hitler’s tyrannical plan was becoming reality during World War II. While Britain upheld a policy of appeasement towards Hitler, Churchill rose as a lone voice to counter that, to call into action the duty British forces had to fight the present threat of evil. I wonder if it’s more than just coincidence that Churchill lived his entire adult life famously fighting depression, something he colloquially referred to as the black dog. So by the time he had to convince a nation that they could both fight and defeat this powerful despot that threatened the free world, he already had vast experience fighting hard battles for his own mental health. His speeches are known for giving the gift of courage, for helping others, as Carroll penned, “believe impossible things.” Journalist Beverley Nichols wrote that Churchill “took the English language and sent it into battle.” I can’t help but wonder how many times he’d already done that with his own inner thoughts for his own life.
After the Nazis had invaded neutral Holland and Belgium—both of which fell easily—and attacked northern France, the UK’s own neighbors—Prime Minister Churchill spoke these powerful words the BBC broadcast over the radio airwaves:
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
(As someone married to a lifelong radio lover and career broadcaster, I feel compelled to mention that during the Second World War, Churchill gave a whopping fifty-six broadcasts. That’s a lot of battles he waged with the English language.)
I mention all of this—believing impossible things, Churchill’s voice of profound encouragement and hope in a dark time, as well as his ability to persevere—because our beliefs and commitment to hope absolutely shape our actions and both help us to wage and win the battles that life inevitably hands us.
*Dear Reader, I briefly mentioned the metaphor concerning lighting fires on my Instagram account, but allow me to dive into it more deeply here.
We recently had a wood stove installed in our house and it came with a blower. Maybe you know all about wood stoves and don’t need me to explain, but in case you’re anything like me and have been used to heat that comes when you push a button, I’ll tell you what a blower does. (This reminds me of a recent conversation I had with my pop, a former college and high school English teacher who is kind enough to help me sift through the prose of the book I’m writing. Reading aloud, he stumbles at the part about a girl giving me a blowout. “I don’t understand this, Jess,” he says. “Some girl? Giving you a blowout?! This is…confusing…at best.” I laugh. Clearly the word blow has really thrown him. So I explain that sometimes I go to a salon and a stylist uses, like, a hairdryer and fancy products and gives me what’s properly called a blowout. The word is not my fault. Like it or not, blow is simply part of it. He takes his pen, scratches a line through the word me, and replaces it with my hair. “That clarifies it,” he mutters while I continue laughing.)
A blower sits in front of the wood stove and helps to circulate the heat by pushing it out into the room at a faster rate. With apologies to my pop for this word again, it literally blows it. Before the wood stove was ready for a fire, my husband TJ plugged in the blower just to make sure it worked. It didn’t. Disappointed, he decided we got stuck with a broken blower. The man installing our wood stove came back the next day to finish the job. TJ told him about the blower and he didn’t even blink. “Right,” he said, “It wouldn’t work without the fire.”
Once the wood stove was ready for fires, per the advice of the man who installed it, TJ started small. He didn’t let the stove get too hot, didn’t let the fire burn longer than an hour. Cast iron expands and contracts while it heats and cools and so requires a specific breaking in process to guard against it happening too fast in order to ensure the longevity of the stove. You have to start small. This, according to the man who knows about fires, is imperative before you get the big blaze. But all through the process, the blower didn’t do a thing. It was plugged in, the socket worked, there was a fire—albeit small—in the stove, but the blower sat silent and still.
TJ kept mentioning the blower. “It’s not working,” he’d say, “I’ve lit six fires now—still nothing. I guess the guy sold me a broken blower.” So he asked the man who knows about fires about the blower again. “It’s still not doing anything,” TJ explained, frustrated. Unfazed, the guy simply said, “It’s not broken. It works. The fire has to get hot enough—for long enough—and then the blower will kick in. Just wait. Keep doing what you’re doing and wait.”
I have a dear friend whose integrity could be a compass. With her, north is always north, south always south. If you lost your bearings because the ocean and stars and everything between switched places one day, the consistency of her kindness and faith could still get you home. Recently, she told me things have been hard and her hope feels tired. I was texting her on my couch, right in front of the wood stove. The blower, by the way, was doing its beautiful work. It’d been working for weeks now. Ever since we’d finished warming up the wood stove—once we got to a sustained blaze that was hot enough, the blower—that silent thing that had been there all along, seemingly useless—awoke, purring noisily like a cat sitting on the lap of the stove. “Jess!” TJ had said the first time it happened, “The blower does work! It really does!” He was so happy. We stood there, in awe of the warmth circulating through our house.
I kept staring at the blower. Tell her it just takes time. That her blower isn’t broken. That the warmth will come, but it just takes time, I kept thinking. So I called my friend. I told her about the guy who knows about fires, about his very practical advice. How it took some faith—lighting these fires and trusting they’d get hot enough to suddenly wake the blower up. Doing it again and again without knowing when that day would be. But we’d remember what the guy who knows about fires said and it felt like encouragement. Our blower wasn’t broken, despite how it felt. We weren’t doing anything wrong: we just had to keep going. We had to keep lighting fires. And though we’d only steadily done the same thing we’d been doing all along, one day things changed. The blower started and the heat hurried toward us. With the energy of a mother making sure her babies aren’t cold, that heat found even the far corners of our living room.
“I think you need to keep going,” I told my friend, “Pretty soon you’re gonna tell me about this heat that has warmed your whole soul, and your whole family’s soul, and that even your community is warmer and brighter because of it.” She started crying and I blinked back my own tears. I think we all need some encouragement. We all need to listen to a guy who knows about fires. Maybe we need to hear it’s okay—actually necessary—to start small, sure, but to start. And then keep going and believe that all the little fires will eventually bring a heat that wakes up the blower and allows us to take off our jackets and breathe deeply and feel something like a sense of arrival. Something like efficiency. Like purpose, forward momentum, the ability to believe the guy who told us the little fires would lead to the bigger fires—that the blower isn’t broken, that it never was. We all need to know that our job is to keep doing what we know is right and good and purposeful and filled with grace—both for ourselves and others. That we need to be relentless, driven by hope, trusting that the fires we light with our jackets still on aren’t for nothing. That our blower isn’t stupid and broken. That there is such a thing as the right time and just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.
One of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, writes,
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
Sometimes life casts us as the man who knows about fires and we are the ones who remind others that the blower isn’t broken. Sometimes we are the ones who wonder if our blower will ever work. We need to know exactly who knows about fires, so they can remind us of the truth. So they can invite us to live right inside hope, under its roof—and not spend even a moment admiring it from a distance. We take turns, we step into this dance. At times we are being carried, other times we do the carrying.
I have another friend who recently told me that her therapist has challenged her to relentlessly notice the evidence of God’s kindness. To write it down, document it like photographs stored up in a book that will tell a story that reminds her to hope. In the Book of Psalms, there is a particular piece of prose from David that has stayed with me. Like a loyal dog, this line has followed me from room to room—even in a house built by grief—reminding me to look up, that there continues to be a reason to look at all.
“I would have lost hope if I had not believed that I would see the loving-kindness of God in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart be strong. Yes, wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:13-14)
David could not have written this line without being a guy who knows about fires. Without having a steady, steely hope. The kind of hope you could rest something as heavy as all your days on. He understood that if the blower still isn’t working, then the fire will simply get bigger and hotter. That there was every reason to hope the blower would come alive tomorrow, next week, next month, that it would happen. That a word like wait could play an important part in a story about hope.
May we look at our small fires, our blower, maybe silent and still, and think, It will work exactly when the time is right. May we continue to steadily light fires, trusting that the blaze will be worth it (it will). And may we practice believing worthwhile impossible things, over and over again. And, like Winston Churchill said over the air waves to a city that was being bombed night after night, may we believe that, by God’s grace, we shall fight our battles with growing confidence and growing strength. Though we stumble and fall, we will keep going and, ultimately, shall not flag or fail.
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