Beauty for Ashes

On Restoration After Hardship

Charcoal is an interesting medium. You take willow or grape vine, and you enclose it in an airtight container, bury it in a fire, and cook it. The lack of oxygen in the container turns the sticks into charcoal, burned but not burned up.... And then we artists take them, and create artwork literally from ashes.

There's a message there.

Have you been through something hard or painful? Been 'in the fire," so to speak? Perhaps so much so that you feel like you'll never heal or be valuable for anything ever again...

But you are. I am. We all are.

In the book of Daniel, the king Nebuchadnezzar decides to punish Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for not bowing to the golden idol he had commanded them to worship. For this grievous slight, the king sentences them to be bound and thrown into the fiery furnace. This furnace was burning so hot, scripture records, that even the king’s men who were charged with throwing the three into the furnace died from the exposure.

Perhaps you, too, have faced hardship so intense, it would have driven others to quail and retreat in the face of it.

But, as we say in the Kingdom, but God! As king Nebuchadnezzar looks on, he sees the Angel of the Lord in the flames with the men, and calls them out of the fire.

And the satraps, administrators, governors, and the king’s counselors gathered together, and they saw these men on whose bodies the fire had no power; the hair of their head was not singed nor were their garments affected, and the smell of fire was not on them. (Daniel 3:27)

“And the smell of the fire was not on them.” The three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are restored, wholly unscathed.

Over an over again in scripture we see God bringing ordinary people out of hardship, struggle, almost certain doom, and even back from death. The truth of the matter is, our God is the One Who Saves, the One Who Heals, the One Who Fights for Us, the One Who Restores and Redeems.

He is the one who gives us beauty from ashes and the oil of joy for mourning (Isaiah 61:3).

On the other side of that fire-process, our plain stick of grapevine emerges from the airtight container to become a chosen tool of the master artist, to render incredible works of beauty.

No matter what you’ve been through or the hardness of the path your feet have tread, so, too, did I go on to find purpose and beauty again, and so too, can you.

“Pair of Samaras,” 5x7 inches; charcoal.
$120 USD + shipping