Flaming Angel, Speak!

I got up from the computer desk in our basement and decided to go upstairs instead of into another room in the family room/lower level. It was one of those fateful decisions to go to the left instead of right. When I turned the corner I was terrified to see fire ON TOP of our wood stove – a big flame on the OUTSIDE instead of INSIDE of it! I am not a woodstove expert but I do know that’s NOT normal. It was a metal angel that my wife had put on the top of the woodstove that had caught fire once the fire inside was roaring at a pretty good clip. Normally metal angels don’t burn – but this one had a nice little candle tucked away inside of it that both of us had forgotten about. Once it got hot enough the wax decided to leave the metal container that housed it and venture out onto the top of the woodstove….and POOOOF! A flame almost reaching the ceiling! That’s never a good sign. My first reaction? I knocked the flaming angel off from the top of the woodstove but that only created fire in two spots – on top of the stove and on the carpeting. I immediately reached for the fire extinguisher that had been hanging in the same spot unused for about 8 years – I hardly remember pulling the pin and then pulling trigger but WOOOOSSSSHHHHHH and the fire on the stove was out and another WOOOSSSSSSSHHHHHH and the fire on the carpeting was out. The smoke alarm went off and I was shaking and coughing from the cloud of smoke, fumes and chemicals (when I had finally settled down my wife asked me where the fire extinguisher was – I couldn’t remember – I looked and looked and finally found it outside on the back deck). The fire was out but now everything was covered with a dusty white film. Shooting off a CO2 extinguisher indoors is one thing – but shooting off one of those dry chemical extinguishers in the house creates a huge mess (of course not as big as a burned out room in the house or even worse).

Kay said when she heard all of the commotion (you know, like me yelling “FIRE!”) and looked down the basement door all she could see was an orange glow. She didn’t think it was another Day-of-Pentecost type moment but she wasn’t sure what had happened – she thought maybe the chimney piping had come loose or something.

Well we spent a couple of hours cleaning things up and, amazingly, the carpeting didn’t look too bad. I was sure there was going to be, not a snow angel, but an angel shaped burn pattern in the floor. Instead it wound up being just a small melted spot. And the next day I bought some mineral spirits and cleaned the wax off from the outside of the wood stove.

My wife and I both made a mental note – always check metal angels for the possibility of flammable stuff in their guts.

The next day I told this story to a friend at work. He thought for a moment and then said, “Wow man that sounds biblical! Don’t you think you should have listened to see if the angel wanted to speak to you?” He was, of course, referring to Exodus chapter three and the story of Moses and the burning bush. (Can you picture that? Me sitting on the carpeting in front of a blazing angel, smoke alarm going off in the background, my wife flying down the stairs, and I simply respond, “Ssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh! We must listen to the flaming angel!”) He told the story to his wife that night and she said it was good thing God hadn’t called me to Mt. Sinai to see the burning bush – her implication being that I would have brought along a fire extinguisher!

I can picture it now – Cecil B. DeMille’s epic motion picture starring Dan Vander Ark as Charlton Heston (in my mind Chuck will always be Moses), Fraser Heston as the floating-in-the-Nile Moses, Yul Brynner as Rameses II (someday I’m gonna try out that Egyptian “bald-all-over-except-for-the-pony-tail” hairdo on my congregation to see what they think; the teens would love it), Anne Baxter as Nefretiri, Edward G. Robinson as that really icky guy named Dathan, Lilly Munster/Yvonne De Carlo as Sephora (Zipporah) and pre-horror movie Vincent Price as the evil lord Baka. Moses had been banished to the backside of the desert where he had married Sephora/Zipporah and become Jethro’s son-in-law. One day, while shepherding his flock near the slopes of Mt. Sinai, he rescued Joshua/John Derek (Hollywood took a little “this-part-is-not-in-the-Bible” license with the rescue of Joshua scene) but something in the distance grabbed his attention – a fiery, blazing bush that just kept burning and burning. While peering at this miraculous sight toward the top of the mountain, Moses (i.e. me) glanced back at Zipporah and said, “Honey, I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight. Hand me that fire extinguisher!”