WILDFIRE WORD: Beauty for ashes

“To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

Isaiah 61:3 NKJV

If you have ever driven over a Cape mountain pass a few months after a fire, you know the sight. Black slopes, and then, pushing up through the ash, green. A season later the whole mountainside is back in color.

In the fynbos, fire is not the end of the story. Many proteas keep their seed closed up on the bush for years and only release it after fire has passed through. For many fynbos plants, smoke itself is the signal that wakes the seed in the soil. What looked like destruction is what makes new life possible.

That is part of why we chose the protea. Some of you are standing on a burnt slope right now. A marriage, a church, a job, a dream that went up in smoke. It is black, and it smells of loss.

Isaiah 61 opens with the words Jesus read aloud in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19), and a few lines further on comes this promise. He does not waste the fire. He does something with the ash. We know a little of this ourselves. A name we loved had to go, and something new is growing in its place.

Let His Word spread like wildfire

It starts with the fire He kindles in you. Today, name one burnt place in your life before God, out loud, and ask Him what He wants to grow there.

Stay close to Jesus, Wildfires.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.