Twig By Twig

We often talk about how we feel the Spirit of God like a fire burning. When you build a fire, you can’t simply hold a match up to a great big log and expect anything to happen except for your match to burn out. The Lord tells us over and over that we have to start with the small and simple things. When we are trying to build our spiritual fire, we have to start out small - little twigs and bits of bark and pine needles, that sort of thing. Every time we do some good deed, we can feel the Spirit burn within us, testifying that it is good. So why not start off with something that is small enough to do that we might actually accomplish it without feeling totally overwhelmed? And then, when that tiny act catches the fire of the Spirit, it is so infectious that it will soon spur us to other small acts of kindness, and with each small twig of goodness that we feed to the flames, the fire gets bigger and bigger. After we've built up a decent sized fire, we can start adding bigger sticks and small logs. Our fire will get hot enough that the bigger and more challenging acts of faith will feed and fuel our testimony, rather than smothering and overwhelming it. But if we have allowed the fire of our testimony to die back down to mere embers, we won't be able to jump right back to throwing great big chunks of wood on the fire. If we are trying to rekindle the flames of our dormant testimony, we have to start with the small and simple things. We have to have the courage and the wisdom and the serenity to accept that it will take time, more time than we might imagine or wish for, before we can work our way back up to the big acts of faith and the great big blazing bonfire of a testimony that we used to have. If we can only manage one verse of scripture a day, or if we can only manage to pay our tithing every other paycheck, or if we can only manage to say one kind, uncritical thing about our spouse per day, or if we can only manage to give our kids our undivided attention for two minutes before we both want to scream, these are the little twigs and bits of bark and pine needles that we can add to our struggling little fire. Sometimes it might seem like all we're getting from our efforts is a lot of smoke in our eyes and then the winds of life come along and wipe out our flickering little flame. But twig by twig we build up our fire until eventually we are big and strong enough to graduate to sticks and branches. We can insist on biting off more than we can chew and trying to become completely perfect in a single afternoon, but this is just heaping great big sodden logs onto a cold and empty fire pit and all that we will end up with is a stack of unburning firewood, shivering in the dark. When we're looking around at all of the other blazing bonfires, none of us want to be fiddling with only a couple of twigs and a pile of matches. But if we can just have the faith to look weak and stupid and small and simple and do the things that a part of us feels is beneath our dignity, or embarrassed that we can't manage something bigger or harder or greater, then step by step, twig by twig, here a little, and there a little, we will grow our fire until the Spirit of God burns warm and bright and inextinguishable within us.