The Prescribed Burn at Francis Marion

Every spring, forestry crews in South Carolina's Francis Marion National Forest do something that looks like destruction. They walk through stands of longleaf pine with drip torches, deliberately setting the underbrush ablaze. Smoke billows. The forest floor blackens. To anyone driving past on Highway 17, it looks like disaster.

But the crews know exactly what they are doing. Decades of fallen needles, invasive scrub, and choking undergrowth have smothered the forest floor, blocking sunlight from reaching the soil. Without fire, the longleaf pines — trees that have stood for a century — slowly suffocate under the weight of accumulated debris. The prescribed burn clears what never belonged there. Within weeks, green shoots push through the charred ground. Wildflowers bloom. The endangered red-cockaded woodpecker returns to nest in the opened canopy.

The fire does not destroy the forest. It reveals it.

This is precisely the image the prophet Malachi reaches for when he declares that the Lord will come "like a refiner's fire." God does not arrive to annihilate His people but to burn away what chokes their worship — the complacency, the half-hearted offerings, the slow drift toward indifference. The refining is not punishment. It is restoration. The Almighty sets fire to what smothers us so that what is true and living can finally breathe again. The question Malachi puts before us is not whether we can survive the flame, but whether we trust the One who carries it.