November 15 – “The Fire”

The night after the race we built a fire.  No, not in the fireplace.  I don’t think their fireplace works, anyway.  And not in the barbeque pit or in a Waco-special fire pit.  Nope.  Not for the Vaughan boys.  We built a fire in the driveway. 

It all started when the boys found a book that Uncle Nathan had given to Josh as a Christmas present.  Something along the lines of making weapons of mass destruction using common everyday materials.  Very MacGuyver-ish. 

The one on building a miniature bomb using a box of matches looked especially appealing to Caleb.  After a long period of painstaking construction (Word has it that duct tape was involved), and with his big brother looking on, Caleb carefully tossed his version into the street and leapt away from the impending blast.  Sadly, none ever came. 

But that didn’t stop the Vaughan Boys.  See, in lieu of the box of matches, the boys got had been using some of those books of paper matches like they used to give away all over the place (I don’t know.  Maybe they still do).  Zak was fascinated by the striking phenomenon, but he was a little over-cautious when he did get one to strike.  As soon as he saw the flames, he tossed the match aside.  A few times Caleb then pounced upon it and picked it up, but Zak, the ever present Guardian Big Brother, warned him to drop it again.  They struggled for a long time with very little success.  Finally Josh just couldn’t stand it any longer.  Dear old Dad felt compelled to impart to his young sons the mystery – the miracle – of striking a match using the folded-over matchbook cover technique.  Wonder of wonders.  It worked. 

Of course, starting the fire itself was an entirely different story.  Damp leaves and green sticks just weren’t catching.  Josh was already implicated in the “adventure,” so he dropped to one knee (and eventually just sat down), right in the thick of things.  And I couldn’t let my son look bad in front of his offspring, so I started scouting for a better fuel source.  Pretty soon we had a hodge-podge pile of leaves and twigs and torn-up paper from the nearby trash can.  And pretty soon we had a raging mini-fire. 

Josh used the opportunity to review a teaching on what makes fire happen, and that teaching ultimately morphed into how to put a fire out.  The boys did a great job identifying all the elements – fuel source, heat, oxygen.  They talked about how pouring water on it would indeed remove heat, but the removed heat in that case would manifest itself in steam, which was just as dangerous as fire, itself.  Caleb and Luke each already had a handful of dirt they had appropriated from a random bag full of the stuff he found in the garage (Sorry, Christi.  You don’t have quite as much potting soil as you once did).  That would take away the oxygen.  And Zak grabbed a stick to help Dad scatter the embers and thus remove some of the fuel.  Uncle Nathan the fireman would be proud.

Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

Father, thanks for the gift of fire.  And thank you for the fire fighters who stand ready to help us out when we are not careful.  Amen.