On our recent trips to Oxford, I have noted that an old tradition is alive and well along Highway 6, east of Oxford. It is the burning season. A lot of the folks in that area have been burning off their fields.
Burning off your field was an annual rite of spring observed religiously by my father. My mother was always afraid of fire, but each year during the month of March my father got a pyromanic gleam in his eye. He began thinking about setting fire to the fields and burning off any dry grass and weeds left over from the previous growing season.
Our fields were surrounded by dirt roads that served as natural fire breaks. Usually, however, the month of March is the windiest month of the year. My father seemed to take special delight in setting fire to the fields on the windiest day.
For boys like my brothers and me, the thing that we feared the most was not fire, but boredom. Daddy’s setting fire to the fields was a perfect antidote for our boredom. Nothing was more exciting than seeing the fire racing across the dry grass. On especially windy days, there was even the prospect of the fire jumping the road and spreading to Mr. Key’s field. Mr. Key wasn’t too thrilled about that, but for us it was the high point of the burning season.
We had no fire department in Plainview so any runaway fire had to be fought by the locals whose only equipment consisted of green pine branches that were used to beat out the wild fire. Sometimes in special times of crisis someone would go to the school, and the principal would let the high school boys go fight the fire. The high school boys enjoyed the break. Usually, the fires did no lasting damage, and my father extolled their benefits.
The problem with fire, however, is that it is so hard to control. Control burns can so easily become uncontrolled burns. It’s like anger. Anger can be of value if it is directed at the right things for the right reasons in the right way. But it can so easily get out of control and do such damage. We sometimes describe a person as having a “fiery” temper. That’s almost always bad. It leads persons to do and say things that can scar the landscapes of their lives for a long time. One observer said that we ought to hold a tight rein on the three “T’s” of life—thoughts, temper, and tongue. If we do, we will have few regrets.
It’s that last “T,” the tongue, that James warned about. He said, “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (James 3:5b-6).
A fire broke out in a field near a boy’s home. When his father questioned him about it, the boy confessed that he had been playing with matches. He added, “But they were such little matches.” Be careful about little words and little feelings of anger. Don’t let this be the burning season in your life.
