Beauty from Ashes: Finding Purpose in Pain

The Ache of Ashes

The rubble smolders around you as you stand among what is left of your dreams and aspirations. Debris continues to rain down as your ears ring from the explosion. Just one word, sentence, paragraph, or conversation has taken all that you’ve worked so hard for and dashed everything. You reach down to pick up a lingering page of your plans off the ground and it turns to ashes in your fingers, trickling back down to the ground.

Dreams can often come and go but there are those that stick with us, those that we actively seek to pin down and make happen. One of mine has been to make a career out of my writing. This is something I’ve held close to my heart for decades and I’m finally making it happen, little bit by little bit. However, one sentence very nearly ended it all for me. Someone told me, “Why be a writer when AI will be doing your job in a few years anyway?” Y’all, I cried. I was driving at the time and tears just poured down my face. I had just been told what I’ve dreamed of for so long was useless and unnecessary. I felt desolate for days. I sunk into a depression. Darkness tried to engulf me. If my dream was useless then surely that meant that I was useless as well. I thought surely that there was no way that I could make writing happen for me.

But what if it wasn’t really the end? What if it was the beginning of a holy mission?

The Divine Exchange

In Isaiah 61:2-3 we see how God will use the ashes, something we consider to be ugly and useless, a make them into something glorious. For all the evil that is done to us, God will use for good.

“—to comfort all who mourn; to grant those who mourn in Zion— to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified” (ESV).

So, rather than be left to wallow in our mourning, God will bless us with gladness, praise, righteousness, and find us the means to glorify Him in our season of mourning. We will be given the arraignments that we need to see through the darkness and see where He is working for our good.

God doesn’t just ease the ache in passing. He wants to heal us completely from the pain. But He doesn’t just fix it for us either. Often God will have us suffer through the pain so that we can heal completely and come out of the experience with a better and different perspective on life. God doesn’t just close a wound; He creates a renewing of our souls in a holy transformation.

The Purpose in the Pain

Consider for a moment the story of Joseph. He went from living a good life as his father’s favored son to being thrown into a pit and sold as a slave by his brothers. After that he was imprisoned for many, many years. But God, y’all. God took all that heartache, pain, and suffering and led Joseph into a position of power and wealth. Not only did he prosper, but God made it so that he could reunite with his family in a joyous way. God doesn’t take us out of the suffering; He leads us through it to the goodness of God’s will.

As I mentioned above, I suffered the loss of a dream. My dream was to touch people with my writing. Y’all, but God! It was probably a week later when I saw a Facebook post of an image that said something along the lines of, if God calls you to it then no one else’s opinions matter. God put this in my way so that I would see it. I sat there for a moment and really let it sink in. One of the reasons I had been so devastated by the comment about my writing being replaced by AI, and therefore why write, was because I had felt called by God to create and write for this blog in such a manner that it would not only glorify God, but to help people find there way to Him as well. So here was this message from God telling me that He had called me so no one else’s opinion mattered. I was finally able to shake off the lingering darkness and depression and feel excited and ready again to build this blog. Talk about transformation.

Surrender: The Sacred Doorway

Transformation takes work. It takes time. But most importantly it takes surrender. Total, absolute, all in, surrender. Yes, God will work miracles and shower us with blessings regardless but if we surrender it all to Him? Oh boy. Be prepared for an overflow of His goodness. Because really, what is it that God wants from us? He’s already provided the ultimate sacrifice so that we don’t have to provide one. He’s already granted us forgiveness and mercy through His son Jesus Christ. He’s already given us righteousness and grace. He’s already gifted us with everything that we should need. So, what do we have left that we can give Him, who already has everything? Our surrender. Our whole-hearted, absolute surrender.

Easier said than done, though, right?

Y’all it’ll take work. I wake up every morning and renew my surrender because I often find myself trying to take back control of whatever situation I am surrendering. Old habits die hard and this particular one for me is taking God a lot of work to chisel out. But I know that if I reset my mind, body, and soul to that of my absolute surrender every day that eventually I’ll find that I don’t need the reminder, that it will have just happened, that my heart will already have let go so that God can take care of whatever it is needing done. Let go and let God, they say. That’s all that He wants from us.

Take your ashes, the ones left over from the destruction of your hopes and dreams and reach out and hand those over to God and watch what He can do with them. Let Him take them in hand, wipe the tears from your cheeks, and watch Him work miracles.

God can take those ashes and reshape them, change them, and create the most beautiful object just for you. In Isaiah, we see Him hand us a crown. Can you imagine being on the receiving end of something so exquisite? Not only do we receive this gift as an object of beauty to wear but it’s symbolic of where He is placing us in life. We are the daughters of the King of Kings. Wear your crown proudly.

Your new hopes and dreams that have been granted to you might not be exactly what you were expecting. They might be vastly different from what you had originally planned out for your life. But these are different in the most important way. These are giving to you by God. They are now your God given purpose. Your calling. Your new battle-cry for life.

Think about a time when everything seemed crushed. Think about how it made you feel. Think about how you moved through it and came out on the other side. Now imagine how different it would have been had you gone immediately to God when life imploded. Imagine how God would have comforted you and led you through so that you were not alone. Imagine the wonderful gift created from those ashes that God could have given you. Imagine how much happier you might have been knowing that your new hopes, dreams, and goals came from God himself.

My hope, my fervent prayer, is that moving forward in your life, my friend, that the next time you feel lost, listless, adrift, that you seek out God immediately and accept all that He has to give you.