Turning Ashes Into BeautySýnishorn

Ending up in ashes is a hard place to be. No one wants to be there. Ashes make me think of the metal bucket we used to use to clean the fireplace. It was dirty and a little dented, but it worked. We scooped up the cool ashes and threw them out, usually in the vegetable garden. Surprisingly, the ashes contained nutrients that made our garden soil richer. Ashes can also be used for making soaps and keeping specific bugs away. But ashes don’t have many more purposes for most of us today. They are something we don’t want to keep hanging around.

There are so many references to ashes in the Scriptures. One that recently caught my attention was from the book of Daniel. Daniel 9:3 says, “So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. I also wore rough burlap and sprinkled myself with ashes.”

Daniel used ashes for a good purpose. He had spent time in the Scriptures and knew his people's dire dilemma. He knew seventy years of captivity was the number prophetically given as the time of discipline for the Israelites. And Daniel knew he wanted to intercede for his people and their sinfulness. So, Daniel put on burlap and ashes and asked God to do what He had already promised—to forgive Israel’s waywardness and end the Israelites' captivity within the prophesied seventy years.

Daniel was a high-ranking government official, but somehow, he found time to dig into God’s Word and pray earnestly for God to work on behalf of his people and their messy life situation. The fact that Daniel pleaded and fasted wearing burlap and ashes showed his humility and his seriousness in asking God to make something good out of Israel's bitter predicament. The wearing of ashes and sackcloth revealed Daniel’s posture of repentance for the sins of Israel. And God most definitely heard Daniel’s prayer. God eventually made beauty from Israel’s ashes.

A second Old Testament story comes to mind involving ashes. This was from the time of Queen Esther’s reign. In Esther 4:3, we read, “And in every province, wherever the king's command and his decree reached, there was great mourning among the Jews, with fasting and weeping and lamenting, and many of them lay in sackcloth and ashes.” Here we see the Jews of Persia showing enormous distress because an edict had been concocted to allow the Jews of the land to be destroyed. The people were distraught, and their response to this plot was to ask God for help, so they put on burlap and ashes and fasted, wept, and lamented. And by the end of the story, God had interceded on their behalf. He again made beauty from ashes.

Okay, so here is what I want you to see. Sometimes our messy, broken lives create our “ash condition.” Sometimes our sinfulness has been the spark that started the ash pile accumulating. It is our fault, and we know we blew it. And then there are times we are in an “ash condition” because of something that is done against us; maybe someone else has hurt us or dealt a hard blow to our lives. No fault of our own. And then we wonder, “God, can You make something good out of all my hurt, out of all these ashes?”

The good news is that God can use it for His glory no matter how and why we landed in the ashes. God can turn our situation into beauty, regardless of the cause.

So, friend, perhaps your situation necessitates confessing, repenting, and making things right with your Creator and anyone you’ve hurt. Maybe your sinfulness is the cause of your “ash condition.”

Or perhaps you consciously need to forgive someone who has hurt you, regrettably putting you into the “ash condition.” Forgiveness—not so much for their sake, but yours.

Or perhaps your current “ash condition” results from nothing done to you or by you; it is just the product of living in a broken and messy world. Maybe you have lost a loved one, a job, or health. Job knew this kind of pain. He had been upright, and yet he ended up in a terribly broken situation. In Job 2:8, we read, "Job scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery as he sat among the ashes.” Through no fault of his own or anyone else’s, Job sat among the ashes, horribly broken and hurting.

No matter how you came to be in ashes, God can restore, renovate, and rebuild whatever has been destroyed and shattered. He creates beauty from ashes. That is Who God is; He is in the restoration business. Our God takes ashes and fashions them into beauty, and He wants to do it in your life. Give Him the go-ahead to work mightily on your behalf. God can turn your ashes into beauty.