The Far Side of the Fire
an essay
Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our essay, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from Monday’s discussion question:
wrote:My husband is a school teacher, so all of our family’s hard-won routines go completely out the window in the summer. On the one hand, it’s such a gift to have him home with us more, but on the other, it necessitates so much more flexibility and patience than I am used to needing! Add in the total exhaustion that comes with spending time in the sun each day, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a season that can be both tremendously trying and tremendously sanctifying.
Multiple people resonated with that phrase: “tremendously trying and tremendously sanctifying”—amazing how often those two go hand in hand! Thank you, Sara, for sharing!
Sara writes two newsletters here on Substack: on
she publishes faith-based nonfiction, and on she shares her fiction. Check it out!
The Far Side of the Fire
This week, the sacred calendar from two different traditions has coalesced to give us the feast days of three incredible women: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Mary Magdalene.
Truth and Tubman, despite being given their feast on the same day (today, in fact), approached the structural and societal animosity of their lifetimes with unique perspectives. Truth battled dehumanization with her words, speaking powerfully across the country with wisdom and zeal, while Tubman took up her metaphorical—and perhaps literal—sword and waded into physical emancipation, freeing enslaved people all throughout the south, a beacon of hope to those who previously had none.
Mary Magdalene, whose story in Scripture is shrouded in questions, is most often recognized as a woman who typified the cultural perspective of unmarried, disgraced women at the time, and yet was elevated and raised up to apostolic status by Christ Himself, an example of renewal from ashes.
All three of these women were born into the consuming fire of completely inhospitable cultures, designed to destroy and subjugate them. All three were probably expected to live and die in relative obscurity and thorough tragedy. There was no growth expected from Black women born into enslavement, nor was there anything great expected from a Palestinian woman of dubious repute in the time of Christ.
Yet these women are immortalized in our books, history, and hearts for their loyalty, their strength, their devotion to their ideals, and—ultimately—their faith. The fact that we remember their names today is a miracle in itself.
In the longest, hottest summers of our lives—the ones more painful than pleasant—it can be easy to feel as though we are attempting to grow in our own inhospitable climates. The odds can feel stacked against us. Every time we manage to sprout two new leaves, one wilts away.
But these seasons of fire can also come to refine and define our lives by the way we face them, not with supernatural fearlessness but with faith. When we trust that all is as it should be, even when everything inside of us wants to give up, the fire burns brighter within than without. And miraculously, we are renewed.
Benediction
May the memory of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Mary Magdalene guide us in strength and power, deepening what we know to be true and nourishing us as we grow through the harshest of seasons.
May our good God bless us with the miracle of renewal that arrives on the far side of the fire.
Thank you for reading!
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Awesome women, all. It is past time by the way to replace the genocidal Andrew Jackson who is responsible for the Trail of Tears the Cherokee Nation followed on the way to Oklahoma.. Harriet Tubman would obviously be more representative of our values, at least our stated ones.