Beauty from Ashes

Growing Dailiy

Beauty from Ashes

Far from the glow of city lights, the grandeur of the night sky can leave you speechless.  A few times I’ve been able to experience August's Perseid meteor shower in the mountains beneath dark, clear skies.  What an amazing sight to see hundreds of “shooting stars” streak across the heavens.

When I’m staring up at all that glory, I rarely think about what causes the phenomenon. Earth is actually passing through the trail of rocky debris left behind by a comet. The individual particles, some as small as grains of sand, slam into Earth’s atmosphere at such high velocities that they burn up. The beauty we see on a clear August night is born out of that destruction.

As Christians, we live in the debris field of a fallen world, don’t we? Sometimes we look around and all we see is loss, injustice, broken relationships, and our own failures. But we also live with the certain hope that God can take what is broken and transform it into something that displays His glory.  He promises beauty from ashes (Isaiah 61:3). That’s who He is.

“People cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end,” but we can trust that He will make “everything beautiful for its own time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He will not only work the fragments together for our good, but also use them to make His glory burn more brightly for all to see (Romans 8:28; Ephesians 1:11-12).


- Catherine Reid