Why "Woman on Fire?": The Story Behind the Name

Jessamyn Anderson
Oct 1, 2015
2 min read

Most of us are familiar with the phrase "on fire for Jesus." Maybe you would explain it as that indescribable high you feel after an amazing retreat. Or perhaps it's the energy that surrounds you at a Christian music concert. As I've grown and matured in my faith, I've begun to look differently at the phrase "on fire for Jesus." For me, being on fire does not always involve boundless joy or the desire to put my hands up and shout out praise and worship music. But it does involve a love for Christ that is like a fire: beautiful, changing, and consuming.

Christ's love is permanently burning in my heart, and that is why I have called this blog Woman on Fire. The beautiful thing about maturing in my faith is that I've become less dependent on the "retreat high" feeling I mentioned and I am able to let Jesus work in my life constantly and consistently. His love persists more like slowly burning embers instead of a spark that only leads to temporary fire. I think Audrey Assad says it perfectly:

Faith is not a fire as much as it's a glow,

Slowly burning embers underneath the snow.

I do not diminish the importance of sparks in our faith lives. Sparks are needed to light the fire, and we need sparks to keep us going in our faith journey. I would consider Destination Jesus (a major high school retreat in central Indiana) the spark that lit my fire. The fire never went out after those retreats in high school, and when I went to college, I started searching for a way to keep the embers burning a little hotter than they did after the retreats ended in high school. I would say my faith exploded in college, but considering how I've used fire references, I don't know if that's very accurate. I would say the flames gradually reached higher and the embers began to burn more consistently. My faith community at Indiana University became my rock, and they helped me see God in everything I did--within and beyond the church walls. The people in that community encouraged me to pursue Christ in the way that He was calling me to pursue Him. When I started to become the person I am called to be, I was more able to feel the burning fire within me (and set the world on fire like St. Catherine of Siena says I can!).

I hope that my love of Christ and the Catholic Church is a glow that others can see every single day. Christ's love is an incredible gift, and His abudant grace is overwhelming and difficult to understand (especially when we can't see the grace through the pain and confusion that invades our lives at times). But how incredible is it that we have a God who loves us because of our messiness and our faults? I pray that we can all entrust our lives to God and allow His love to burn constantly in our hearts.