To Join the Dance You Must Get Close

"The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us; or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in the dance. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire; if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry."

C.S. Lewis

as quoted in Ministry in the image of God : the trinitarian shape of Christian service / by Seamands, Stephen A., 1949-

Iron in the Fire, Fire in the Iron

Sadu Sundar Singh of India often used the example of the iron a blacksmith places in a red-hot coal fire. Soon the iron turns red and begins to glow like the coals, so you can truly say that the iron is in the fire and the fire is in the iron. Yet we know that the iron is not the fire and the fire is not the iron. When the iron is glowing, the blacksmith can bend it into any shape he desires, but it still remains iron. Likewise, he emphasized, “we still retain our personality when we allow ourselves to be penetrated by Christ.”

Sadu Sundar Singh, quoted in Nick Harrison, ed., His Victorious Indwelling  (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), p. 108. Citation from Seamands, Ministry in the Image of God