RENEWED

 Look carefully: this is a forest coming back from a devastating fire several years earlier. Some trees survived, their trunks blackened. Toothpick-like ghosts of dead trees and emerging new trees and shrubs fill in the landscape. This area is prone to fire and it is also a major east-west highway through Washington's Cascade Mountains. I remember traveling it one year as a fire burned itself out. A state vehicle with a blinking red light on its roof led a limited numbers of cars at a time through the still-smoking pass. But there was no smoke on our most recent trip, just the marvel of how the land regenerates while still leaving reminders of the old fire.

Life also has times when we pass through a “fire zone.” Speaking of his wayward homeland, Isaiah prophesied: “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze, for I am the Lord, your God” (Isaiah 43:2b-3a). For the Israelites, the “flames” would be the searing sorrow of being yanked away from their homeland as captives of Babylon. But the whole section of this prophecy emphasizes God's enduring love through their difficulty. Renewal, new life, would come.

I've lived long enough to watch many people I cared about (and prayed for) make bad decisions. Big chunks of their lives were burned up as they walked away from God. One day I answered the phone to the sobs of a young woman who'd attended a Bible study in our home. She'd yielded to her boyfriend's demands for sexual intimacy before marriage. Now, she regretted it and felt God would never forgive her. As I rushed over to her apartment and hugged her, trying to comfort her with God's counsel, I recalled this verse for those who truly repent of their sin: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). She cut off the relationship and sought a fresh start with Christ. Later, God did bring into her life a committed Christian man, and they married.

Trials will come in life. That's a given. But so is God's renewing presence:

...for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. (1 Peter 1:6-7)

In central Washington, where I live, we've had our share of runaway, destructive fires. But every spring, forest management teams plan “controlled burns” to reduce the fuel for future fires. In many ways, that's a picture of what happens when people get “burned” by their bad decisions, then confess and turn away from them. Such times of sorrow are God's reminder: Don't go there. Don't make those choices. The pain isn't worth it. Renewal, though it may take time, will come. Stay the course—God's course.