Where There’s Smoke – Part I

Our home has two seasons – deck and fireplace. In the warmer (and drier) weather of summer, the deck becomes our family hangout, especially in the cooler evenings. When cold (and wet) weather sets in, the hangout spot is the family room fireplace in the pre-dawn mornings as kids sleepily get ready for school.

This year’s fireplace season started this week. Fires each morning warm up our cold, dark house. I sat working the wood and the flames early today, waiting until the fire was burning on its own so I could go and prepare everyone’s tuna fish lunch sandwiches. Then a log caved in where smaller pieces had turned to ash and billowing smoke spewed out. I shifted the logs with the poker, causing flames to shoot up, instantly dispelling the smoke.

As I watched the flames eat the smoke, the expression, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” came to mind. And I realized how inaccurate that statement can be. The opposite is what was playing out in my fireplace this morning – as it does every morning. Smoke is more often a sign there is no flame – or at best a very weak one. Once the fire flares up, the smoke (as a visible, choking cloud) disappears.

What that expression, “Where there’s smoke…”, speaks to is the notion that one thing obviously leads to another. If A is true, then B must be true. But that is not necessarily the case. In fact reality may very well be the opposite of what we presume.

Waiting for this morning’s fire to combust, I thought about how much misperceptions play a role in society, even among people of Faith, people who are called to consider all possibilities and “give the benefit of the doubt” (otherwise known as “grace”).

One prime place for Illogic 101 is on Facebook. I’m a newcomer to this social phenomenon and as much as I check it to stay connected, I find myself wearying of the free flow of verbal smoke. Today someone wrote about how common sense is such an oxymoron in our society. And while in this statement the writer proved astute about the lack of common sense, I am not sure that our society is any more oxymoronic or nonsensical than any other in our present world or in generations before.

The tendency that social networkings do foster, be they internet-based or the more traditional face-to-face kind, is the inclination to spread common nonsense. A favorite writer of mine is Hans Christian Andersen and I’m particularly fond of his tale, “It’s Absolutely True,” starring some very silly barnyard hens. Often, as I look after to our own hens, Andersen’s word pictures come to mind.

The story is how a hen loses a feather and how that ordinary moment turns into a supposed frenzy of self-plucking cacklers that even the original feather-loser doesn’t recognize. As with Andersen’s barnyard inhabitants, very intelligent people with a lot more smarts than my own fowl start jumping to conclusions about fires when all that can be found is some choking smoke. I’m aware that conclusion-jumping is as old as the stories of Abraham’s lot in Genesis. Making assumptions is a trait common to all mankind.

I think about this, how much we assume about life, faith, politics, our neighbors, even ourselves. And I wonder how little of life really is what we think it is. I’ve been troubled by the emotional frenzy of American political life, be it on the right or on the left. I’ve become more and more amazed at the truncated perspective people have about other people’s views on God and faith. And I wonder, just wonder, sometimes as I sit and tend my early morning fire, what God thinks of all this human smoke.

God made mankind, both male and female, so that they (God and people) could share in relationships, where they really, truly get to know each other. Not just assume that A leads to or means B, or presume that if there is smoke, then there must be fire. In the mornings, I don’t even dare assume that if there are flames that I then can walk away from an actual fire. “It ain’t over until it’s over” is another common saying. Jesus put it in terms farmers of the day could understand: “Don’t separate the wheat from the tares until harvest time.” Or as we fowl-tenders say, “Don’t count your chickens until they hatch.”