Joh 12:24 Truly, truly, I say to you, Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.

Driving through the Grampians in Australia after the long, hard bushfire season of last year, it was amazing to see how much damage there was, and yet how many trees survived. Not only that, but a few months later you could already see the regrowth, even though it looked strange (fuzzy eucalypts, with leaves not just on the ends of branches, but up the trunks as well). I have read that bushfires are part of the cycle of life for forests, necessary for some species to survive (like pines). Apparently pines need the intense heat of forest fires for their seeds to be released from the cones.

Sometimes life’s like that too. We lose the things we hold dear to us, and it seems like a forest fire, leaving devastation and a few blackened trunks. We grieve and mourn our losses. Sometimes it’s the loss of a long-cherished dream, and it’s as if God Himself stands against us. I have dreams I have kept in my heart for something like ten years, and the time has never seemed quite right, and sometimes everything in the world has gone against the fulfilment of these “desires of my heart”. This is why I am drawn over and over to the Lord’s illustration in the Bible (and there are many stories, of which Christ’s death and resurrection is the climax) of how death brings life.

It’s never easy, but in the same way that forests recover, so we can too. And sometimes what comes out of those ashes is a thing of inexpressible beauty, a new way of seeing, a new path, a better way of reaching one’s goal. You can never see that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but beneath all the black stuff, beauty and renewal are stirring, and soon there will be new life.