Ashes
(a post from Christina Larsen)
Tim and Christina Larsen
What if, ashes weren’t meant to have a negative connotation?
What if, ashes were the beginning of something?
Ashes are generally thought of as a sign of mourning, devastation, and loss; but what if the thing that burnt or the thing you lost wasn’t supposed to be had in the first place?
Please hear me! I am not making light of the devastation a fire can cause, that I would never do. More so, the metaphor of what a fire can do or what it represents.
What I’m suggesting is looking at the things in our lives that we might need to release into the fire: Pride, Guilt, Greed, Hate, Envy, Lust, Anger, Bitterness, etc. Things that we were never meant to hold on to. Last year in January, the Lord asked me to Release several things into His capable hands. Around the time that COVID had made its appearance in the United States, I had a dream.
In this dream, I was standing on the edge of a large crevice in the ground. In my hands, I was holding a bag of trash. As I turned around and looked behind me, there was a multitude of others standing in a line with their bags of trash just like me. There standing before me was my Grandpa (a person who often appears within my dreams as a representation of Christ) ready to receive my bag, along with everyone else’s. See this large crevice in the ground was a place I was familiar with. It was a large burning silo on my Grandpa’s farm. When I was younger I would often see my Grandpa take the trash down to the silo to burn. He didn’t have curbside trash service out in the country on his farm; he would burn his trash and what remained were ashes.
We are asked to release the things that we were never meant to carry with us. We are asked to relinquish control of the things that so deeply desire to control us.
Just like Frodo when he was finally on the edge of the fires of Mount Doom, he refused to let go of the very thing that had poisoned his mind; the thing that refused to be lost. It wasn’t until it was torn from his hands that he was set free. This movie scene represents all of the things that are poisoning us, but we refuse to release them. What if, instead of having the things ripped out of our hands, we freely turned them over?
The past year has been hard, I won’t bore you with a list of all the hard, but if I allow myself to look toward the ashes that remain and see that I was freed from many other things; then that is where the beauty rises from the ashes. Just like in Harry Potter and Fawkes the Phoenix is reborn from the ashes; perhaps, we too can become new after we allow the things that are truly detrimental to us to be burned. Perhaps, there could be Freedom, Peace, Rebirth, Joy, Forgiveness, Comfort, etc. in its place.
If we allow the One who controls the fire to have control over us, what might we gain or what might be reborn from the ashes if we only release them to the fire.
(Post by Christina Larsen)