A Fire Shut Up and No Name For It Yet

The lamp on her bedside table has a bulb that is slightly too bright for eleven at night and she has been meaning to change it for a year and she likes it too much to change it.

Wednesday. Or Thursday now, technically. The house is quiet. Her roommate went to bed at ten and there is a mug on the floor by the bed that will be there in the morning.

The app is open. She did not decide to open it. She has noticed that, which is the whole problem: she picked up the phone to set an alarm and then twenty five minutes had gone and she was in the middle of Isaiah with her eyes stinging.

Fourth time this week.

She is twenty six. She is not going through anything. Work is fine, and she has good friends, and she went to her cousin's thing at the weekend and enjoyed it.

But something is happening and she does not know what it is, and here is what she is most afraid of. Not that it is nothing. She is afraid that if she tells anybody, they will make it into something. Somebody will say the word calling at her. Somebody will ask whether she has considered ministry, or a course, or moving, and then a thing that is currently alive and unnamed will become a decision she has to defend at family gatherings.

So she has told nobody, and she keeps opening the app at eleven, and she is holding this on her own.

Hey. Sit on the floor with your back against the bed. Because there is a prophet who described exactly this and used a word for it that is not the word anybody uses now.

A fire in his bones, and it was in there a long time

Jeremiah is having the worst possible week. He has been publicly humiliated and he has decided to stop, and he says so, and then he says why he cannot.

Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.Jeremiah 20:9

Shut up in my bones.

Not on display. Not producing anything. Contained, internal, and by his own account for some time, because weary with forbearing means he had been holding it a while.

That is the important detail for a woman sitting on a bedroom floor. The fire is described entirely as an interior condition before it is anything else. It has no output in that verse. It is just in there, burning, in a man who is not currently doing anything about it.

You are carrying something interior and unexpressed, and the man who first described that condition called it a fire before it had produced one visible thing. That is not a way of making your late nights sound more important than they are; Jeremiah 20:9 puts it shut up in his bones and gives it no output at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a prophet's worst week and lays it in a bedroom at eleven at night with a mug on the floor. You do not have a product. You have a fire, and those are different, and the second one is allowed to exist on its own.

Now the second half, and it is the thing you are actually frightened of.

You are afraid somebody will name this for you. And you are right to be careful, because that happens constantly and it does real damage. A young woman gets stirred by God, tells somebody, and by the end of the month she is being asked about Bible college by three separate people who love her.

Here is what I want you to notice. Nobody named Jeremiah's fire either. He named his own condition, in the middle of complaining to God, and God did not correct him and did not add a project to it.

You are under no obligation to convert this into a plan, and the fire in that verse never once had to justify itself with a decision. Ecclesiastes 3:7 says there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes keeping something quiet a legitimate season rather than a failure to steward it.

What I am refusing to do here

Let me be very plain with you, because you are twenty six and people will do this to you for the next ten years.

I am not going to tell you what this means. I am not going to suggest that God is calling you into anything, because I have no idea and neither does anybody else who has read four paragraphs about your evenings.

It might be a beginning of something that will take a decade to become clear. It might be that you are in a season where Scripture is genuinely feeding you and that is the entire event, which would be a wonderful thing and not a lesser one. It might be both.

What I will say is that reading the Bible at eleven at night and crying is not a symptom. It is one of the more ordinary things that happens to people who are close to that book.

You are doing something completely normal for somebody spending time in Scripture, and it does not require a diagnosis or a destination. Psalm 119:103 says how sweet are thy words unto my taste, yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old page taste like that in a young woman without any career implications whatsoever.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read silently.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how clear you are about your future. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.