Rising from the Ashes

God sends us through a Holy Fire for a purpose. He never wastes a hurt. He also never wastes an opportunity to set ablaze that which doesn’t serve Him.

 So why do we hate sitting in ashes?

For a short season of my life, I was really into gardening and one of the things I learned was that ashes are very good for the soil and bring the pH back into balance. Some of the most beautiful spring flowers came from rain-soaked soil filled with ashes during the fall and winter.

During the intense blaze of my Holy Fire came an utter sense of quiet in my spirit and soul. Not the kind of quiet that is welcome after a cacophony of noise; but the kind that screamed of loss. I no longer heard the Lord’s prophetic voice. I couldn’t sense the Holy Spirit’s prompting. I couldn’t see what my future looked like. I couldn’t feel my destiny in my spirit.

This frightened me more than I can explain. It was as if I had forgotten my name - my identity.

I wonder if this is how amnesia victims feel.

It was a hollow cavern that echoed for infinity in my spirit. I had no desire to discipline my spirit into submission. No desire to pray any deeper than, “God minister to…God bless…God heal…” The intercessor was in a burned out stupor. The insightful prophetic was deaf and mute. The Word sat and stared back at me as if in another language.

It was a nothingness. The only thing present was a vague knowing that I wasn’t alone, and an understanding that above the nothingness, He watched and waited. The past was a shadow that didn’t loom or lurk – it was merely present. It didn’t shout, gesture, or condemn. It just was. Present to the degree that it reminded me of who people saw me as and what I was known for.

For most of my life, the sense of destiny and fulfillment was always in front of me – just out of arms reach – but still in front of me like a carrot dangling, enticing, promising. Yet, for the last 18 months, I sat on my laurels in the wake of this nothingness with my dreams and hopes burning to the ground. For months, I felt guilty because I had no vision, no hope, no dreams.

During my Job season, I learned a valuable lesson – don’t go sifting through the ashes after a Holy Fire. You get burned. I don’t know how many times I sat in the midst of my ashes sifting for a piece of my burned up dreams and hopes and each time, I scorched my fingers.

Why do we persist in sifting through ashes for burned up dreams?

Because we tend to focus on who we were…not who we are. God’s destiny for you and me does not exist in the ashes. It exists in the glorious by-product of seeds sown in soil that has been fed with the ashes of our past and then rain-soaked.

Each time I sifted through the embers, the Lord in His infinite Mercy and Grace reminded me, “Child, your destiny does not lie in the ashes. Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old. Behold I will do a new thing. Now it shall spring forth. Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Is 43:18-19.

I feel the seeds rising through the soil, pushing through the ashes. There is a road just up ahead.

I see it. I feel it.