Fireweed in blooms in a mountain valley. Fireweed appears quickly after an area burns and illustrates how God heals and restores both nature and our lives.
Today’s post on how God heals and restores is a guest post from Dan Story of Danstory.net.
I [God] will weep and wail for the mountains and take up a lament concerning the wilderness grasslands. They are desolate and untraveled, and the lowing of cattle is not heard. The birds have all fled and the animals are gone (Jer. 9:10).
A fire’s devastation
I live in Southern California—a place notorious for devastating seasonal wildfires. In October 2007, five separate wildfires, fueled by seventy-plus mph gusts of Santa Ana winds, raged across Southern California. More than 600,000 people—including the entire town where I live—were told to evacuate their homes.
Altogether, the swift-moving bushfires incinerated nearly 350,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,500 homes before contained, fifty of them in my neighborhood. It burned to within thirty feet of my house.
Soon after the fires were extinguished, I rode my mountain bike for several miles through a small section of the national forest severely damaged by one of the fires. The land looked biologically sterile. Nothing green survived; no wildlife was visible. Only charcoal skeletons of chaparral and, in the canyon bottoms, scorched live oaks and sycamores were all that remained of the chaparral forest.
God heals and restores nature
Despite the near-total devastation of thousands of acres of wilderness, within weeks signs of healing appeared. Sucker roots sent forth green shoots at the base of blackened shrubs. Dormant seeds sprouted from the ash and grasses emerged to cover the barren earth.
By the following spring, wildflowers and saplings were flourishing, providing food for returning populations of wildlife. Today, you would have to look closely to see the scars of the great conflagration.
In God’s wisdom and love for His creation, He designed nature in such a way that a remnant of plants and animals always survives to reinhabit the land—even after the worst natural catastrophes. When disasters strike, nature immediately begins to restore its equilibrium and return to its former state of ecological balance and stability. God heals and restores to the wounded earth.
God heals and restores us
This is a picture of how Jesus can restore joy and hope in the aftermath of unexpected firestorms of sorrow, loss, and heartbreak that sometimes sweep into our lives. In His profound goodness and love, He can heal the worst wounds that shatter human lives—just as God heals and restores the effects of seemingly ruined nature.
Perhaps not the physical healing we observe in nature—although God sometimes chooses to do that—but most assuredly emotional and spiritual healing, which in the long term are usually more dreadful and long-lasting than physical wounds.
As hard as it may seem, when going through times of suffering and loss, God is always present to help us through our darkest hours. With time and trust in Him, God can turn our anguish and hopelessness into spiritual strength and hope; we can emerge from sorrow and despair to optimism and a willingness to get on with life.
God even uses our personal experiences of heartbreak and grief to comfort and encourage other people going through similar seasons of heartbreak and grief. Paul writes: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4).
In spite of the apparent hopelessness of the terrible circumstances we sometimes face in life, the Bible assures us that God can heal and restore our broken lives following the worst life can throw at us—just as He heals and restores what looked like permanently destroyed nature after a firestorm. As the Psalmist promises, God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3).
About Dan Story
Dan story is the author of many books and magazine articles, including “Where Wild Things Live”; “Wildlife Watching Techniques and Adventures”. You can read about his ministry and books at www.danstory.net. His newest and upcoming book is “God’s Other Book; What Nature Reveals about God, People, and the Afterlife.”