Fire

“My name Andrew!”

There is a lot of background noise. It is difficult to hear him clearly.

“Andrew?” I ask. His voice seems a bit familiar.

“Yah, Andrew! Mah hah! It burn! It on fire!”

Something is burning.

He continues, “I play the drums for the church.”

An image of a sturdy, tall, albino Liberian man working feverishly at the drums every Sunday. I know this man. I see him in the hospital ward pulling a beat out of the air, weaving a heartbeat into the songs we sing during the services for the patients.

A moment of recognition. “Andrew! Yes, I know you! You are not coming on Sunday? You telling me that?”

“No! I come on Sunday. I call to say my house burning!”

Andrew’s house burned down that night because of an open flame. All of his belongings are gone. He is a former Mercy Ships patient. He was calling for one of the nurses, his friends.

That following Sunday, Andrew plays the drums as promised. His has still been reduced to ashes, but he is still playing with the same passion. The very hands that Mercy Ships operated on slap against the hide and sound bounces off the metal walls of our ship, the paper butterflies hanging by yarn from the ceiling, rattling in our rib cages. Henrietta begins to sing. Her voice is pure, untrained, and her words come from a deep place of experience, and love for God.

Across the room, a woman, the mother of a two-year-old patient, begins to flail in her bed. Her arms and legs fly into the air. She is like a rag doll, under someone else’s control. A doctor tries to subdue her and a nurse takes away the toddler who has begun to cry uncontrollably. The Africans continue singing, clapping and praising God. The mother’s hips jut into the air, her body totally limber. Several African woman place hands on her and begun muttering something under their breath. She stands to her feet and lifts her arms high into the air. A hospital worker holds her by the waist. The mother’s eyes are closed, she is not singing to the song, but she is enraptured.

After a few minutes, she sits back down on her bed. She looks around, breastfeeds her baby and claps to the rhythm of her song. She has no idea what happened. Linda, the ward counselor, asks her later if she is okay. The mother does not have a single memory of what just happened.

After the service, I offer my help and condolences to Andrew. His house is gone he says. It went up in flames. I’m sorry, I tell him. He knows he has friends here and as he leaves, I am glad that he is our friend too. Linda says it is acceptable to help him financially, so I do. As I walk away from her, I turn back and ask, “What happened to that mother?”

“She baptized by the Holy Ghost Fire.” Linda smiled. “She delivered.”

Fire. The destroying kind. The saving kind. The fire that spreads. The fire that is unforgettable, that is unquenchable. The purifying fire that shows us what we are made out of.