Fire And Ashes
Author: Maureen Gray
October 21, 2022
So… I start my thoughts and apparently my stories with “so”. My 5 year old grandson was trying
to tell a story to our family and kept saying…SO…and would launch into his story… if he was
interrupted or lost his train of thought, he would go back to the beginning and say, “SO”...his 5
year old cousin finally said, why do you keep saying “so?” Fitz (His full name is (Fitzgerald and
he truly is a Fitzgerald) responded, “If you start a story, you always start with “So” Ok, Fitz, I
have a story.
So…I recently heard someone talk about giving God their ashes. I immediately I jumped to the
scripture, “He gives beauty for ashes” When I hear those words, I focus on the promise of
beauty. I want beauty for all the wreckage of my life, don’t you? I want that exchange…FOR
things burned up, I want beauty. I want to believe this. I want to hope this is true. But deep
down, I sometimes wonder how beauty really emerges out of something that no longer has the
capacity for beauty.
Perhaps I just need to make the best of the ashes. Maybe I need to leave the ash pile and
move toward beautiful…I’m not really sure on how this works.
All of a sudden, I realize I jumped to the beauty part because the ashes part is confusing and
painful and disappointing. But this particular talk was about ashes, not beauty.
What are my ashes? What are yours? Who wants to gather up our ashes? I have a tendency
to deny ashes, ignore ashes or look beyond my ashes. Today, I’m going to be courageous and
look AT my ashes…
The thing about ashes is by the time they are ashes, we don’t remember how much wood it took
to create them. We don’t really know how long everything took to burn and we don’t know which
ashes belonged to which piece of wood.
That’s my life. I bet, it’s yours too. All we know is there is a heap of ashes that came from fires.
So what are my ashes…some I know and some I don’t yet. Some are forgotten and some are
old and cold and some are still smoldering. The more I thought about ashes, the more I began
to see.
I have ashes from a childhood I never truly lived. It was burned up in rejection and fear and a
variety of abuses. A sense of well-being was lit on fire by a lived in reality of “something is
wrong with me” Confidence went up in smoke in flames of failure and disappointment.
Performance and perfectionism was ignited by only being valued or seen for what I did.
I wanted to compete in the Olympics for figure skating and knee injuries burned up my dream.
I was left with a pile of ashes. Over the years, I lost relationship with my mom, with my brother,
for years with my dad, a relationship with one sister, then another.
The dream of having a perfect family went up in smoke. My idea of my marriage went up in
flames. My expectations of what my life would look like as a follower of Jesus was incinerated.
Losses of cars and houses and family and ministries and friends. Kind of sounds like the
scripture in Matthew 19 “ whoever leaves houses or land or brothers/sisters, fathers/mothers/
wives/husbands or children will inherit eternal life.” Except I didn’t leave those things…they
were taken from me and burned up in the fires of life. And is that what merits eternal life? Loss
of everything that is precious and valuable? I have weathered the intense heat of addictions
and the suffocating toxicity that comes with the defilement of molestation…not of myself but of a
couple of my children. I have watched helplessly as the proverbial house of another child
burned to the ground in divorce or the relentless burning of hope due to the physical
impediments of a grandbaby. Betrayal has burned me. The smell of smoke is all around.
And the Lord says, “Give me your ashes?’ Really? He wants all that’s been consumed and
without form? The remains of what once was? To do what? Create something new? Give the
suffering meaning? Is this really possible or just a spiritual fantasy?
Then a thought hit me…He’s asking me to give Him what is too heavy and unsightly and
burdensome for me to keep lugging around. He’s asking me to look at what the ashes
represent, remember the pieces of wood burned, to admit the pain of the losses, to grieve and
mourn and to release it all as an elimination process in my life. Most importantly, release it to
the only One who can hover over the formless nothingness of ashes and create a garden and
declare it good He’s actually know how to do this as He’s done it before..
Maybe I’ve been looking for all the loss to one day either not matter or make sense and what I’m
being invited into is the beauty of a lifetime of weight and burden being lifted off of me. Maybe
the beauty is not limited to what can be made out of ashes, maybe the beauty is me having the
ashes cleared away. Maybe I am the beauty He is creating. Maybe you are too.
Let’s give Him our ashes and see.
BACK