sorry about the delay between parts one and two of this thought!  our family went nutto and traveled and birthday-ed and celebrated thanksgiving.  oh, and my daughter cricket hacked off part of my right thumb with a potato peeler right before the giving of thanks transforming me into an incessant whiner.  i was distracted by my constant need to tell everyone about my very small injury.  but here we go!

so we were talking about shadrach, meshach and abednego.  the fiery three, as it were.  here is the second thought that amazes me about their tale.  to catch you up (if you have been snoozing during the three weeks between the two parts of this post), these three wouldn’t bow down to a statue upon threat of death.  even when threatened, and then actually THROWN INTO, a very very hot furnace.   just wouldn’t do it.

the next part of the story is when they are in the furnace.  the king sees that there are now FOUR people in the furnace.  he orders them out.  as a side note, i can never imagine HOW this happens.  how the king sees them in the furnace.  in my mind, they are thrown into a very thick plastic tube through which all the other people are watching.  sort of aquarium style but with fire instead of water.  but i realize that this scenario is technologically impossible, so i leave it up to you to determine how the king saw into the very hot furnace.  if you come up with something good to replace plastic tube image, let me know.

on we go.  when they come out (after going into the fire, the king noticing there were three and not four, then coming out), they are fine.  which we, reader of the story, just knew was going to happen.  i sit and read and say “SEE!  i KNEW that God wouldn’t see how committed they were and do nothing.”   my worry is discarded.  hope is confirmed.

but here is the SUPER cool part.  not only were they saved, but it says that they DIDN’T EVEN SMELL LIKE SMOKE.  it is crazy talk.  i mean smoke, even a small smoke situation, is amazingly pervasive.  i remember, back in the day when i was in and out of smoky places because they let people smoke inside, i would have to take a shower to get the smell out of my hair before i went to bed so that my pillow wouldn’t smell like smoke.  because if my pillow smelled like smoke, then my hair FOR DAYS would smell like smoke.  so days after being in a smoky place, NOT SMOKING, my hair would smell like smoke because it had touched another object that had NEVER BEEN INTO a smoky place.  smoke smell is not something with which you should trifle.   or at the very least, if you do, you should come armed with buckets of febreeze.

what an awesome example of God’s grace to us.  because in this example, He shows us that not only does he want to bring us through but he will bring us through UNSCATHED.  amazing.  we won’t even have the SMELL of this situation around us.  not even have that greasy chinese food smell stuck to our clothes when we emerge from the restaurant.   i can’t really get my head around it.

i think that whenever i am going through something, i always assume there will be lasting scars.  when my daughter slices off part of my finger.  when someone decides they don’t like me anymore.  when i have a really crushing failure.  i just assume that even if i emerge intact (which i often have faith to expect), i will carry with me some remnant of this experience.  not a good “wisdom gained through experience” remnant, but a messy, painful kind of remnant.  a hurty place that will never quite go away.  some bad reference that i can never quite avoid.  something that will slightly cripple me in the next race.  but this story show us that it isn’t true.  you can emerge and NOT EVEN SMELL LIKE SMOKE.

i am sure that some of you, like me, are wondering if God is really going to show up like this.  or thinking that you already smell like smoke.  here are my caveats to this thought:  1.  see the fiery three post one.  these kids had signed up whether God showed up or not.  they knew God’s truth.  that was it.  that is how we must move forward.  what God says is true whether it goes our way or not.  2.  for those already feeling smelly, i like to think of the 10 lepers.  there is another biblical story (sorry to use more than one) where Jesus heals 10 lepers.  leprosy eats your flesh…totally not awesome.  so just to get it to STOP eating your flesh was a big deal.  but one of the lepers goes back to thank Jesus, and he is restored to pre-leprosy.  the other nine still were without leprosy, but this guy was restored.  so if it’s already still too late to miss the smoke smell and the fire damage, think of him.  RETURNED to smoke free attire.

this is just such an awesome thought to tuck in at the start of something icky or something that could end up icky.   that you could see the end without even the smell of smoke.  not scarred and bruised Braveheart movie style, but not even soiled.  awesome.  mind-blowing.