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Finding the Beauty and Purpose in Ashes

November 1, 2012 by Dan

Sometimes things just stink. Have you experienced that? Sometimes things go wrong, fights at home, income drops, kids are wild and your team loses and doesn’t make it to the World Series. Sometimes life is just hard and you wonder why. I know I have spent many hours begging God for relief and deliverance. Often, I don’t find it and it’s for my benefit that I don’t find it. I am not always in the situations that I want to be in, but I have found those situations are where I learn the most.

It’s approaching winter time, and the trees are bare, the grass in brown and what I see out the window at my new job isn’t gorgeous. It’s brown and looks dead, but I know there is beauty in that. There is no snow yet, just fallen leaves and bare trees and brown grass. The earth is at rest, it’s not growing, it’s not blooming, it’s asleep.

We spend so much time pushing, striving and fighting. We have to do more, do better, and we forget what God tells us over and over and over again. Be still and know He is God. Be still and experience His presence. What He is doing in us and in our life is so much more than we can do to impress Him, or to fix our lives. We strive so hard to please God, but in reality what pleases God is what He can do through us. Apart from Him, I can do nothing and on my own, I strive in vain.

Are you learning to be still, to be patient and to find the beauty in the brown? Looking at the earth at rest reminds me to be at rest and to be still in God. I have lots of dreams and plans an ambitions, but it’s His timing and His work that matters. It doesn’t matter so much what I can do, what I can fix, what I can build or what I can create. It only matters what He is doing in and through me and how that brings Him glory.

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