This is a piece that I wrote last month for the Newhall Presbyterian Church Lenten Devotional, where I served as their Children's Director from 2003-2007. I left that position and took the position at Malibu Presbyterian in the spring of 2007. Unexpectedly, the next fall on October 21, 2007, the church burned to the ground on Sunday morning.
I walked carefully in my red slip on shoes through the cool ash that was once my new Malibu office. It was only two days since I’d sat on my couch at home on Sunday morning watching it burn to the ground on Channel 4. I heard Pastor Greg warn, “Be careful Kristie!” as we walked through the debris to our offices. There was an eerie silence as we cried numb aching tears and had our first glimpses of the nothingness that was left of the church building. My tears mixed with the dust of black ash landing on my face, it all seemed to mingle together and it tasted like salt and death.
I couldn’t breathe. The air was still thick and orange. I looked at around at this sweet sacred space and I couldn’t believe it.
What are you supposed to do when you find yourself standing in ashes?
I took a bent pipe sticking out of the ashes and began to dig. I prayed “Oh God, just one beautiful thing…could there just be one thing left here???”
I had everything just so on Friday afternoon in my office. My couch, the Sunday school supplies carefully laid out, the pictures and notes I’d pinned to the bulletin board from kids I’d loved over the years. It all felt so robbed from me, taken so swiftly by thick orange flames and the strongest of wind.
And everyone has something to say, and much of it falls so empty when you are standing in ashes.
“This will be a good thing. You’ll see…”
“God just wanted to give you guys a new church building…”
“Maybe God is mad at the church.”
You probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe it hasn’t been a fire that took something important to you, but perhaps it was when a relationship, a job, some sort of security and rhythm that left you with your hands in the ash. It seems to be woven into the human story like breath and the sunrise, and there aren’t easy answers or fancy theology to explain it all away.
A week later, I laid down on a blanket under some trees in a park. The leaves were turning yellow and the sun was causing them to seem translucent against the dark blue sky. I had no words. I couldn’t even form the words for the questions my soul was asking. I knew I was blaming God in my heart, and the questions needed to make their way out loud. They felt childish to me, but they were real. Perhaps the Father can handle my childish questions over and over.
Why this building and not that one?
If you are so powerful, then why don’t you stop this pain?
Would a good father do something so horrible?
Did He do it? Or cause it?... and if not isn’t it the same if you allow it?
And I know all of the right answers…they just didn’t seem to fill me up anymore. They seemed trite again. They seemed empty and hollow.
I laid there in stillness and pondered all of these things in my heart as if it was my first moment of honesty and truth after this horrible week. “Here you are…I’ve said it…I sort of blame you. I am pretty confused at the way you move or choose not to!”
In the stillness of those moments under the yellow trees I surrendered. I can’t tell you why. I didn’t get my answers. I just know something deep, I know that God is love and that He is good. I know I don’t understand why all of this pain remains a part of our experience on this earth, but I choose to trust Him anyway. I choose this grace.
I whispered those words to the sky. Words I keep learning to say over and over as my life goes through the cycle of ashes to new life like a rhythm, like breathing.
“I trust you.”
And so you see back in the ashes that first day, I found something beautiful. The pipe dug through the ashes and soot, much like the texture of course sand. All of the sudden through my tears I felt the pipe hit something hard. I dug it out. Black and charred, there it was: a piece of a plate. I recognized that it was a small plate from my grandmother’s china. Before the fire, I had put it on my desk to hold my business cards and to remember that I was loved and invested in as a child. It was a small thing, but there in the ashes a beautiful thing saying that I am loved. I am seen. I am remembered.
God sees our suffering and is with us in it. We are not invisible to Him. This tangled up life of ashes and sunshine is only a beginning. There is so much more to come, and that is my hope. I hope it is yours too.
Jesus on the cross reminds me that I need only to “come,” I don’t have to understand. I am asked to trust that He is a God of redemption, love, hope and freedom. This God calls us near to Him when churches burn, relationships fall apart, loved ones die and money is not in the bank. We are loved beyond measure and our circumstances do not tell the story of His love, the cross tells that story and I see evidence of it as he puts my life back together each day that I utter a quiet “I trust you.”
You are loved. You are seen. You are remembered.
“I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free…”
Acts 7:34
Lord, help me to trust you even when I don’t understand you. Help me to believe the mystery of this life leads to an eternal redemption so loving my mind can barely comprehend.
