Overtaken

The last time my husband Bill and I took this wandering road through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was in early December last year.  The forest had just been devastated by a huge fire that engulfed 11,000 acres of the heavily wooded mountains.  Thousands of huge trees lay on the scorched black earth, like so many gallant soldiers fallen in battle, the other towering trees stood vigil, wounded gravely and imprinted with deep scars from the flames.

It was like traveling through a black and white photograph of a war long lost but never forgotten.  The acrid smoke lingered with a sadness and a grief that was hard to breathe.  The air smelled of death.

Late last November, two teenage boys had been "horsing around," one account said, flicking lit matches one by one, laughing as they dropped them into the dry brittle leaves along a wooded trail, an area already stressed from a long-abiding drought.  Huge devastation always emerges from even what would be considered small rebellions.  Sin is never small.  And it always impacts others.

A few days later, the anger of the flames was caught up by hurricane-force winds.  Within a matter of hours, the raging fire spread to Gatlinburg, filled with tourists for the Thanksgiving weekend.  Houses burned swiftly to the ground, tragically killing at least 14 people who, surrounded by the inferno, struggled to evacuate, and leaving homeless thousands of those who made it out with just the clothes on their backs.

But even then, even as the winter rains and snow fell, even in that deep greyness that looked like despair, the redeeming had already begun.  Because even in how God created the trees and the foliage, He designed inherently in them the stuff of resilience and restoration.

God redeems.  We know that.  But this weekend, Bill and I saw the evidence.

We drove along that same road, noticing that the grey barrenness was now showing the beginnings of tender green on the singed forest floor, as an old photograph hand-tinted.  We pulled into a picnic area that had been closed due to the fire.  A trail we had taken in the past was now opened. 

We prepared our hearts for the worst.  We expected a cemetery, a solemn walk, a wake of sorts for the dead, for what had been and what had happened.

But as we emerged up the short ridge from the parking lot, we were speechless, but not from devastation.  We saw what resurrection looks like.

What appeared as beyond hope, that which was dead or dying, had been overtaken by green, the great bursting forth, not just of hope, but the reality of the God of breaking through and a vision of God's faithfulness.

And He who sat upon the throne, said,

“Behold,

       I make all things new.”

                      Revelation 21. 5

If God can renew, restore, and redeem a dying forest, oh, what He can do in our own devastation and despair.  He brings us impossibly back to life.

Biologists already know that in the aftermath of a tragic fire, newness follows close behind.  The first sign of renewal is the rapid spread of grasses, plants, and a proliferation of wild flowers that are oddly nourished by minerals and  nutrients left behind in the soil by the fire.

 

What God designed was an emerging carpet of deep green and blossoms as far as we could see, overtaking the scorched areas.  Indeed, even tree seedlings have already begun to spring up out of the ground.  One particular species, the Table Mountain pine tree, which only grows in this mountainous area, actually depends on fire to reproduce.

In some areas where the canopy of large hardwood trees had been opened by the fire, sunlight now penetrates to spur on the growth of young trees and other plants.  And as a result, wildlife has returned to those areas, providing a new and fresh source of food for woodland animals, both great and small.

God redeems.  There is not a person on this earth who has not been affected by this fallen world.  But even in the struggle and the suffering, God provides the strength to get through.  God has already designed the way out, the way through, the way to newness.  He did not just leave hope behind in the ashes or even in what we can see coming up from the ruins.  He gives us hope on which to stake our lives.

We are surrounded by the devastation of wrongdoing, we are consumed by the blight of our own selfishness and that of others, but stronger still is God’s forgiveness to us.  It comes at a cost.  And that is why God sent His Son Jesus.  

To bring us back to life itself – the way God meant us to be -- overtaken by His love and grace.

"They would see with their own eyes, and touch with their hands, the evidence that God's power is greater even than death -- they would know that nothing, and no one, can ever be ultimately lost when God acts to rescue and restore."   -- Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak (2016)