Glorious Devastation...

I've been having a conversation with one of my old internet friends over YIM, and it got me to thinking.

We were discussing ice storms. He apparently had one this December, while I had one last December. I was at my parents' house, then because of my work. I wanted to be able to make it to work if things got bad, and my parents live right next to that job, while I lived 30 miles away.

My parents live in the woods. For two days, all you could hear was the cracking and crashing of tree branches. You had to be careful any time you went outside, because of the falling branches. I still had to go to work, because I worked at a truck stop, so they never close. The roads had a thick layer of ice on them for days.

After, the ice began to melt, I looked around the woods where I grew up. They had completely changed. Yes, there were still trees everywhere, but when you looked out, the trees seemed barren. There were few trees that were whole. There was great devastation all around. When I looked at the ground, I saw what looked like a war zone. There were broken branches everywhere, the ground was torn up because of the fallen branches, and you could see where whole trees had been pulled down by the ice.

It hurt somewhat to see the woods I loved torn apart like that. I could tell that the woods would never be like they had been. But in this destruction, there was a kind of beauty. I could not describe it, because it wasn't a surface beauty, as much as it was a hidden beauty. It wasn't a beauty that could be observed by the eye as much as it could by the mind. I suppose it was more of a future beauty.

I was looking back at that and thinking, isn't that what God does to us so often? We get broken down, cracking, and falling apart, sometimes affecting things around us. From our point of view, it seems like senseless destruction, but there is a beauty in it, if we look. It's not a beauty of what is happening, but what will happen. Once the change has happened, we will be better off than we were before the change. We will never be the same. We will bear our scars, but we should bear them gladly, for the changes draw us closer to where we belong, our home and our Father.