The Threshold 1. FIRE

On 25.07.22 I had a vision...

I was back in the place of my soul. I have been to this particular place before a few years ago. In 2018 The Lord had said He would comfort all my waste places, and I had instantly had a picture of those waste places.

A vision had opened up of a brownfield site; condemned land, broken shed, scrubby grass, barbed wire. Jesus was there with me and I remember being overwhelmed with shame. I remember saying to Jesus, “Lord I am so sorry that this is all I have managed to do with the place”! Jesus sat down with me and for 3 days I was so aware of the beauty of His presence surrounding me in that place. But what undid me most of all was His humour! Gentle humour from a true friend, who knows the worst about a situation and about you! who diffuses your shame with true empathy and with laughter. Together we looked at the bereft landscape and I knew that together we would replant this wasteland. He would do it with me!

So in the intervening years, I had expected, on peering back into my ‘waste places’ to see some degree of flourishing. But I never really did! This was alarming. I didn’t really want to ask why… so I parked it. And those years have been tough! Some of the toughest I have yet walked through. Repeated cycles of fear, shame, re-lived trauma, the latter partly self-inflicted might I add (that’s for another post). Wrestling with the call of God on my life, not feeling adequate or equipped or gifted enough, approaching the threshold, and then pulling back. Fear at the vanguard, re-imagined trauma at the rear. Feeling STUCK! Frozen, mired in between, desperately looking for the fence so I could sit on it a little bit longer, but God had already told me that He had taken the fence away….. God’s goodness doesn’t always feel good!

Oh wretched man that I am!!! Who will deliver me from this body of death!

So back to my vision on 25 July.

Jesus pulled me back into that same place. That waste land. MY waste land. Now it is totally burnt. A fire has swept through and all I can see is a blistered, scorched landscape. Blackened stumps and ash + residual smoke from an inferno that has taken everything.

And Jesus was there. He was sitting on the ground. He had soot and ash on His clothes and face and He looked… the word that came to me, was devastated.

Jesus looked devastated.

The last time I had been ashamed, this time I was desperately embarrassed. I walked up to Jesus in my vision and said something like ‘Jesus I am so sorry you have to be here, this is my fault, this is my soul! Jesus you don’t deserve this; you should not be here in this place’. I had such compassion for Jesus, having to be a part of such destruction! (Heartfelt sentiment but totally flawed theology!)

And Jesus looked at me with such love in His eyes, and He reminded me:

That the appearance of the glory of the Lord is like a consuming fire on the mountaintop. Exodus 22:13. That from the brightness that goes before him, coals of fire are kindled. 2 Sam 22:13. He reminded me that He speaks from the midst of the fire, Deuteronomy 4:15; and that He is IN the fire with me and that he will never leave me nor forsake me, not even here in this empty charred blackness. He reminded me that He is the one who gives beauty for ashes, and that there cannot be beauty without ashes nor ashes without fire.

And I know what I am witnessing and experiencing is an answer to my prayers.. ‘Oh Lord send fire to burn up the chaff in my life.. Utterly consume me and take everything that is not of you!’ (Note to self…Be careful what you pray for!)

But still, Jesus, the man with eyes of fire, who IS a consuming fire, looked devastated!

Devastate has a dual meaning:

1. It is from the Latin de vestare meaning to thoroughly lay waste. Fire goes before Him that will thoroughly lay waste His enemies. He is coming after fear, unbelief, addictions, pride.. the works of the flesh. He is coming after principalities and powers that keep us enslaved. He can do no other, it is who he is(!) the pure and shining one, in whose very nature is the total annihilation of all that is evil.

2. A second meaning is to be shocked or upset, and Jesus was! Why? when He IS the fire? Because He has walked through it all with me. He has seen the cost and the pain and the quiet, secret suffering. He does not stand distantly on the edges of our lives offering half-hearted condolences, He steps into the very essence and fibre of our reality. He lives it with us. We often pray Jesus break my heart for what breaks yours. We don’t give much thought to the truth that His heart breaks for what breaks ours! Beautiful Jesus.

I saw and witnessed and felt first hand this Jesus, MY Jesus, who is both Fire AND Living water, who is both Lion AND Lamb, who is both Judge AND Saviour.

Then Jesus took me by the hand and we stood up together and He spoke to me and he said ‘prophesy to the ground’...

And so I did. I called forth beauty out of the ashes. I decreed regeneration of the ground beneath my feet; I spoke to the tough little seeds that represented dreams and hopes that had lain dormant for decades, encased in unyielding resin and I decreed a total ruination of that stubborn resistant outer layer and a bursting forth of seeds that need to go through a fire regime in order to germinate.

And as I stood there with Jesus I watched as a vast carpet of tiny green shoots sprang up, each with 2 leaves.

The number 2 represents division and separateness, and I knew that the greening I was watching represented the crossing of a threshold; from death to life, from wilderness to promise from stuckness to holiness. What is coming forth from the fire will carry the DNA of the fire and it will burn and separate the chaff from the wheat, it will separate the holy from the profane. It will create division (Matthew 10:34) and it will create LIFE!

The very next day I read this in the word of the Lord:

They will say: This land that was laid waste has become like the garden of Eden’ Ezekiel 36:35

So, beloved of Jesus, I want to prophesy to you:

If you have been through a season of fire. If you have been left devastated and bereft in a barren, blackened wilderness, if it seems like the fire has taken everything… friend do not despair in this place for you stand on a threshold. You are at the end of you and you are being planted in the fertile, rich soil of Isaiah 43:19-21

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland