Beauty from Ashes

I’ve always liked fire—soothing candles, crackly campfires, beachy bonfires, ski lodge fireplaces—until June of 2013, when my friend fire became my enemy.

Suddenly, Black Forest, our home for the previous twenty-two years, was consumed by ravenous tongues of flame racing through the tree canopy to decimate 511 houses, and the enormous stand of Ponderosa Pines in which those houses stood. With only myself and our thirteen-year-old son in town, our family had little ability or time to evacuate. We lost our house, vehicles, and nearly every material possession we owned. Our children’s baby pictures, my wedding dress, the house my husband had built with his own hands, the grand piano he had purchased for a housewarming gift for our daughters, books collected over decades, and Bibles with notes taken over a lifetime would never be played or read again. My father’s college class ring, the letter informing our daughter of her status as a National Merit finalist, the programs listing our younger daughter’s leading roles in musical theater and ballet productions, and our son’s plaque for a state swim record were nothing but ash. The silver tableware set my mother had given me a few years prior to the diagnosis of the cancer which had taken her life exactly 1 year to the day before the fire took our home would never again grace our holiday table in her memory. All material evidence of our lives was reduced to rubble, never to be seen or touched again.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a new beginning. But in the moment, it was an overwhelming end: of the home to which we’d taken our children at birth, the rooms in which we had held school, mementos of our lives which can never be recovered. All that our children had ever known, and all that remained of our own possessions, was ash. The trinkets testifying to our lives were gone forever. The voices of the ‘stuff’ that proclaim our existence were silenced. As one daughter put it, it appeared “as though we never lived.”

Some people rebound from tragedy with such gratitude that they say they wouldn’t trade the experience and would gladly go through it again. I’m not that good. I wouldn’t. Given the choice, I would retain what we had.

But I now know experientially that I am better off for the pain. Despite my preference for holding on to my old rusty trinkets, God renewed all things beautifully, in His time. In His skillful hand, darkness has been wielded as a tool of enlightenment for us who love Him. The feet which shuffled, faltering, through ashes have been led to new paths of growth. The eyes washed with tears now see clearer visions. The mind boggled and heart weighted down with grief have launched from the springboard of rubble to catapult into the future—a future secured not by dusty memories, but by trust in the God who beckons us ever forward toward the unknown which He alone has seen and guards for us. The hands longing to cling to what is gone forever now hold treasured keepsakes of new life.

In one of those embarrassing instances—when ‘leading’ me has consisted of grabbing my arm and dragging me, kicking and screaming, where I was absolutely unwilling to go—God produced gain from loss, vibrancy from dullness, and beauty from ashes. Some gifts come wrapped in rubble. Had I not been forced by disaster, I would have missed the freeing heart lessons extended to me by God’s own hands reaching out from the middle of flames. That’s just how He is. He teaches us to grow into newness of life, whether we are willing and eager to give up the old or not.

God called me from the fire and the ash. He calls us to rise above the stuff of this world, all of which will one day dissipate, and step inside the eternal truth that who and what we are is beyond the reach of flames, surpassing the worth of all of the trinkets we hold dear and strive to attain. I would never wish on anyone the trauma that my family went through in that season. Yet the value of the experience outweighs the pain. When one’s life is reduced to rubble, the realization dawns, deeper and more certain than the truth we have lived in before, that nothing of any value can in fact be truly lost.

Isaiah 61:3 shows us the character and purposes of God through even the apparent losses and tragedies of life. Shifting our gaze from our circumstances to the purpose and substance of our being, He enters our world,

to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor. (Is. 61:3 NIV)

When all the physical evidence marking our lives has turned to dust and blown away, the people we have become remain. The eternal purposes for which we were crafted, lovingly and individually, by our Maker, cannot be destroyed by any force of nature or humankind. The love that holds us fast is immutable.

Nothing was taken from me that day that could have lasted. One day, all physical things will decay. Sooner or later, whether in a fiery blast or at the hand of the relentless progression of time and deterioration, all that you have here will end up as our possessions did, never to be seen again. In light of that reality, what will we invest ourselves in today? Shall we pursue more trinkets, or seek lasting treasures whose value lies in their impact on eternity?

Lord, free my heart from my grip on earthly things, that they may have no grip on me. Help me to see that all around me is transient and temporary, except for the unseen world of eternity beyond the reach of destruction.