Through the Fire
What stress, science, and Scripture taught me about becoming a whole leader
There is a fire that consumes.
Leaders know it well. It is the kind of heat that tightens the chest, narrows vision, accelerates the mind, and convinces you that survival is the only goal.
The body feels it before the mind names it.
Adrenaline rises.
Cortisol floods.
We brace. We react. We push. We perform.
This is the consuming fire. Many leaders carry its scars.
Isaiah names the reality. It is not if we walk through fire but when (Isaiah 43:2). The heat is unavoidable. But there is a deeper truth in both Scripture and science.
Not all fire is destructive.
Some fire refines.
The Science of Two Fires
Stress research draws the same distinction.
One type of stress is chronic, unmanaged, and relentless. It overwhelms the nervous system. It impairs thinking. It weakens decision making. It erodes identity.
This is the consuming fire.
Another type of stress creates adaptation. Researchers often call it hormetic stress or the stress that strengthens.
This kind of stress reorganizes neural pathways.
It activates resilience.
It sharpens clarity.
It is the same heat, but with a completely different result.
This is the fire that forms.
I have stood in both.
There was a season when I worked in a culture that lived in constant crisis. Everyone bracing. Everyone reacting. A system driven more by urgency than by clarity.
I remember watching a leader absorb the weight of it. He carried the chaos of the organization in his body. He was burning from the inside out.
What he could not yet name, I had already lived.
There is a difference between being burned and being transformed.
One fire destroys without purpose.
The other fire clarifies purpose.
One pushes us into survival.
The other reveals who we are becoming.
One isolates.
The other reveals the Presence already in the flames.
The Fire That Forms
There is a truth we often avoid in leadership and in life.
The growth we want usually requires heat.
Identity reshapes under resistance.
Perspective clears when illusions burn away.
Wisdom emerges at the temperature where old patterns can no longer hold.
The goal is not to escape the fire.
The goal is to discern which fire we are in.
Is this the fire that consumes?
Or the fire that refines?
Biology, Scripture, and lived experience all point to the same reality.
The refining fire is not punishment.
It is process.
A Different Question for the Heat
When the pressure rises, our reflexive question is simple.
How do I get out of this?
But a better question, one that shifts the nervous system and opens space for transformation, is this.
What is this fire forming in me?
That question interrupts survival mode.
It turns the heat into meaning.
It brings us back into alignment with the promise of Isaiah.
The fire may be real.
But you will not be consumed.