Lamar Howell's Weblog

I treasure going into my backyard and making a fire in our clay fire-bowl which sits on the deck next to our banana garden. It’s where I go to slow the world down and watch as the stars stop spinning, the refuge where I talk to God and try to hear his heart through the hiss and crackling, to see more clearly through the dancing flames and the liquid gray smoke.                                                                                                                      It’s eleven at night and there’s a prayer watch starting at my church. If I jump up now I could get there and make part of it. But the fire is blazing and it would be an insult to extinguish it. So I’ll sit here until it dies down, and go to a prayer meeting another time.            I told my son last night what I would do if I were his age, seventeen and I had my life to live over. I would study the lives of the great preachers like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Charles Finney, and Billy Graham, and I would be a revivalist like them. I told him that if God would touch my tongue with coals from the altar like the prophet Isaiah experienced, and put an uncontainable fire in my bones like he did to Jeremiah, then I would go anywhere He sent me and spread revival’s flames.                                                                                                                                Later that night I read a verse from Psalms, It said, “O Lord, how long will your jealousy burn like fire?” I took the liberty to change the question and personalize it. “When will your jealousy burn like fire? When will it burn like fire within me?”                                       I want to burn with jealousy for my beloved country, to safeguard its godly heritage and fight for its enduring spiritual legacy; to be ablaze with passion to win the hearts of the youth away from their games and to see them spellbound by the heroics of God among his people, to show them a rare picture of the majesty of his moral excellence, and to capture with painted words something of the beauty of his perfection. I am jealous for the innocence of the young ladies who are being ravished by unholy passions of selfish brutes.                                                                                                                                         I anguish for white-hot purity of doctrine to return to the church. I long to be seared by the flaming eyes of him who sits on a throne whose radiance outshines jasper and carnelian gemstones, and be branded by the iron rod in his right hand, the scepter by which He will rule the world.                                                                                                 So, when you see me in a nameless crowd or we scurry past each other with cruel master Time snapping his whip at our backsides, I beg you to refrain from reminding me of the weather, or the win-loss column of a sports team. My invisible shallow mailbox of “good mornings” and “Did you have a good weekend?” is full. Simply look at me and breathe this question heavenward for my sake: “When will your jealousy burn like fire?”                                                                                                                                      I will thank you for that.