When my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird, a master teacher, intended to plant life lessons indelibly in my mind, he often clarified the unfamiliar by discussing the familiar. Once when I asked how I could serve God as well as he did, he pointed to flames flickering in his fireplace and began a lesson that made the unfamiliar familiar.
“Imagine a little flame inside you wanting to join the big flame from which it came: God Himself. Even if a man ignores his conscience — God’s voice — for so long that only a tiny spark of that little flame remains, even then it yearns to burst into a roaring blaze, signifying a loving bond with the Divine Flame that is God, the light of the universe.”