The Wick That Still Smokes

She would not put it as dramatically as this if you asked her, and this is exactly what she thinks.

She thinks that at some point somebody, meaning God, is going to look at what is left of her faith and put it out, and that when it happens it will be a mercy and a tidy thing, the way you pinch a candle that has gone down to nothing rather than let it sit there smoking in a room.

Sìne is forty-one. Two winters ago something went out. She would struggle to tell you what; it was not a doctrine and it was not a scandal and nobody hurt her. Something in her simply stopped being warm, and the practices went one at a time over about four months, the way things go when nobody is watching: the reading first, then the praying, and then the going, though she still goes.

She still goes. That is the thing that puzzles her more than anything. Twice a week she comes into this chapel on her way home from work, and she sits on that bench for about ten minutes, and she does not pray, and she does not read anything, and she does not feel anything at all, and then she gets up and goes home and makes her tea.

She has been doing that for two winters and she has never once been able to explain to herself why she keeps doing it.

And she has decided, without any bitterness, that she is smoke. That the fire is gone and this is the residue, and that some kindness will eventually finish it.

If you are down to smoke, here is a verse with your exact condition in it, and the surprising thing is not the comfort. It is that the condition is described so precisely that somebody clearly knew.

Somebody wrote down that exact state

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.Isaiah 42:3

Take the second half, because it is hers.

Smoking flax. Flax was the wick, and a wick that is smoking is a wick where the flame has gone and the ember has not. It is the exact state between burning and out, and it is the most useless and most irritating thing in a room: it gives no light, it makes the air unpleasant, and every practical instinct in a person says pinch it and be done.

That is the state Isaiah names. He did not name a struggling believer or a dry season in the abstract. He named a wick with smoke coming off it, which is precise, and which means somebody knew this condition existed and thought it worth writing down.

Shall he not quench. And the promise attached is not that He will relight it in the next four verses. It is, first, that He will not put it out.

You are not going to be put out, and it is already stated in the negative on purpose, and the promise names your exact condition rather than a general one. I am not being gentle about a woman's two winters. It is written in Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a picture of a wick and lays it on somebody sitting on a bench feeling nothing.

Smoke means it is still lit

And now the thing she has not considered, which is a fact about wicks.

A wick that has gone out entirely does not smoke. It sits there cold and does nothing. Smoke is what a wick does when the ember is still in it, which is to say that smoke is not the evidence of a fire that has died. It is the evidence of a fire that has not.

Two winters of sitting on a bench feeling nothing, twice a week, on the way home from work, with no reward of any kind attached, is smoke.

Nobody does that for a fire that has gone out. Sìne has been reading her own persistence as pathetic, as habit, as the ghost of something, and it is not. It is the ember. There is no other explanation for a woman with no motivation whatsoever continuing to turn off her route twice a week for two years.

You are still alight, and the smoke is already the proof of it, and a dead wick makes none. Scripture says the smoking flax shall he not quench, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps an ember in somebody through a winter that produced no light at all.

Bruised, and not broken

And the first half of the verse belongs to her too, and it is worth saying.

A bruised reed shall he not break. A bruised reed is a reed that has been damaged in the stem, so it will not sound properly and it cannot be repaired, and again the practical instinct is to snap it and cut another; reeds are not scarce.

The whole verse is one idea said twice: God does not do the sensible thing with damaged, marginal, barely functional articles. He does not clear them away.

Sìne has been expecting a tidy God. The verse describes an untidy one, who keeps things that any competent person would have replaced.

You are being kept rather than cleared away, and it is already what He said He does with the barely functional. It is written that a bruised reed shall he not break and the smoking flax shall he not quench, and the Holy Spirit is the one who declines to do the sensible thing with a person who has stopped working properly.