The Stuff That Burns

During worship on Sunday, I saw a picture in my mind of a huge field of dead grasses. I felt that God was showing me that the dead grass represented the things that have died inside of us. Our dreams. Our hopes. Even the deadness of our very selves — our ability to accomplish what we want or to live the way we want to live. Our failures are dead things. It seemed to me that some of these things had not just died once but had died repeatedly. The child you hope will stop using drugs but keeps getting trapped again. The financial picture that never seems to change. The baby you have been waiting for. The marriage you expected. The dream that once upon a time seemed so real and close to fruition that has instead slipped further and further from your grasp to the point that you no longer grasp for it. Dead. Dead. Dead. Again. Again. Again. Things so dead that you have given up on them entirely. Those dead things.

Jesus died too, you know. He was truly and actually dead, and to my knowledge you can't get deader than dead. You're done for when you're dead, and that's how lost dreams and dashed hopes feel. But here's the good news: dead grass is easily ignited. And that spark that ignites the grass is the Holy Spirit. We don't know when he will drop a spark on our dead grasses, but when he does, they will light up and the fire will burn for miles.

I think most of us regret the dead things in our lives and think somehow we should have prevented them from dying. We should have done better. We should have made it work. We should have prayed harder, had more faith, held on tighter. But that's garbage. God doesn't need our strength or our "perfection" or our good ideas. I also don't think he needs our prayers or our faith or our obedience (at least in the way we think he does), though some would likely disagree. I know he doesn't need our success — we're the ones who need that. As Paul said, "That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." God loves to use our weakness. I think God really wants us to know it's not on us to make things happen, it's on him. This is why he chooses the foolish and the weak. Unfortunately, the way we often learn all of this is by watching a lot of things die.

In God, we can actually embrace the dead things in our lives, thank God for them, and live at peace with them. We can do that because we know the dead things are fuel for life. As Jesus said in John 12: "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." The life reaped from the death of Jesus is still rippling across this earth and will keep rippling. Don't be discouraged. Someday, I don't know when, what has died inside of you will be ignited and generate more life than you'd planned on. Buckle up. This isn't the ride you were expecting.