To jed, sha and anyone else who's been to the pits and back.
The old story tellers in many lands tell of a fabulous bird, sacred to the sun, called the phoenix. This huge bird, covered with an iridescent rainbow of gorgeous feathers, had no equal on earth. Not only was no other bird so beautiful, but none other sang so sweetly nor lived so long. The storytellers could not agree on the age of the phoenix. Some said the bird lived for 500years. Others said its life was more than 12000 years long.
When those years ended, the phoenix made itself a nest of twigs from spice trees, set its nest on fire, and, with the nest, was consumed. Nothing remained except scattering of ashes on the earth. But then, the storytellers said, a breeze caught those ashes and somehow from them there arose another phoenix, a new firebird even more splendid than the one that had died. He would spread his wings, they said, and he would fly up to the sun.
The storytellers spun this myth in the fond hope that somehow it could be true. They spoke to something deep within each of us, the longing that out of the destructive tragedies of life, something better, more magnificent might come. What the story tellers could only imagine contains a truth of which Jesus Christ is the reality. Just as the more glorious phoenix can rise only from the ashes of its dead self and ruined nest, so great faith rises only from our dashed hopes and ruined dreams.
“If God wants you to trust Him,” wrote Donald Grey Barnhouse, “He puts you in a place of difficulty. If he wants you to trust Him greatly, He puts you in a place of impossibility. For when a thing is impossible, then we who are so prone to move things by the force of our own being can say, ‘Lord, I am utterly, absolutely nothing.’ ”
We can trust God’s perfect timing. We can trust His love. We can come through our difficult experiences stronger in faith and hope as we learn that God is there for us in our loss, in our sorrow. What we let Christ do in our situation makes the difference.
-Alice Matthews