Beauty for Ashes

Ash has a taste.
That of iron in blood.

I first knew it at eighteen, hearing the shot of a stolen bullet go off in the barracks next to mine. A fellow conscript had just taken his own life.

Perhaps you know this taste too—in collapsed dreams, fractured trust, and moments that left only dust.

The nurses are wheeling in the crash cart. I’m told to leave the room. There’s a commotion on the other side of the wall, doctor is shouting instructions. I’m standing there, new in faith, praying for my friend. Tears stream down my face.

Ten minutes earlier, Johnny and I were standing with Craig. He was in a coma after a car skipped a stop street and hit the front wheel of his bike. Craig was thrown head first against the kerb. He looked so peaceful lying there. One couldn’t see the swelling on his brain and his body only had a couple of minor scrapes. Johnny had asked him to move a finger if he could hear us talking to him. His finger twitched, then moments later his back arched and the chaos began.

He died in the early hours of the morning. My prayers to save my friend ‘unanswered’. My newfound faith was crushed, “what kind of God lets this happen?”.
My heart broke.

I still carry that ash.

Decades later, that taste returned—this time in a soon to be repossessed Oriental Bamboo delivery truck, spreadsheets of broken dreams still open on the laptop beside me.

Scripture speaks often of fire. The flaming sword at Eden’s gate. The bush ablaze yet unconsumed. Ziklag in ruins. The baptism of fire that tests every work. Again and again: fire that consumes, yet also makes room for new creation. And always, the promise hidden within it: that from ash, God brings beauty.

The Flaming Sword – Innocence Lost

After Eden’s fall, a flaming sword was set to guard the way back (Genesis 3:24). Fire became the boundary between the life we lost and the life we could not yet return to.

I felt that sword’s flaming edge in northern Namibia, 1987. I had been so sure then about good and evil, about our righteous cause against the “terrorists”. Until I heard Paddy bragging about exploding a man with the 20mm cannon, describing with relish how the body had disintegrated into nothing. Until I walked past the Casspir with flesh and blood decorating the grill, learned how a captured man was driven through thorn trees until he screamed the answers they wanted. Helping the wounded and carrying the body bags out of the helicopter hammered the truths of war into my soul.

I still hesitate to write this. But these are the ashes I carry.

That was my first 'Ziklag'.
The incineration of innocence.
The stripping away of naïve trust in human goodness and institutional righteousness.
The flaming sword cut through my illusions.
What was left was ash.

No longer sure who to trust, believe.

The Burning Bush – Presence in Fire

Moses met God in a bush that burned but was not consumed (Exodus 3). Fire that did not destroy but summoned.

I remember my own moment encountering that summoning fire in the dust, body scraped raw during brutal “bos busie” training, fifty kilograms of kit pressing me into the ground. I could not finish. Not one more push-up. Not one more step.

And then I heard it. A voice as clear as my sergeant’s bark:

“Choose this day whom you will serve.”

Not the chaplain’s sanitised Christ. Not the institutional Jesus who blessed our bombing runs. But the Jesus who stands in ash heaps and asks souls to decide. And when I whispered “Yes, Lord” through cracked lips, strength flooded my body like electricity. Ten more push-ups became possible. Ten more kilometres effortless.

The fire did not consume me. It called me.

Ziklag – Everything Burned Down

Years later, David’s story became my own. He returned to Ziklag to find the city plundered, wives and children taken, everything in flames (1 Samuel 30). His men wept until there was no strength left.

My 'Ziklag' came when Oriental Bamboo collapsed, taking certainty with it. My fifth business venture dream shattered. It came again in that soon to be repossessed delivery truck, parked on soil I thought would become our farm. Dreams meant to be set apart for Him—too early, too fragile—burned to nothing.

And perhaps you’ve stood at your own 'Ziklag'—when everything you thought secure was suddenly in ruins, when what you had built with hope and faith turned to ash.

But Scripture says: “David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.” In Ziklag, false securities burn. Even righteous dreams collapse. And yet it is precisely there—in the ash of what we thought we could build—that a deeper faith is forged.

Baptism of Fire – The Refiner’s Work

John the Baptist said,

“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire”
—Matthew 3:11

We tend to forget the ‘fire’ part. Paul warned that every work would be tested: wood, hay, stubble consumed; gold, silver, precious stones refined (1 Corinthians 3:12–15).

The chaplains who blessed our missions could not withstand that fire. Nor could the institutions I had trusted. They burned away. What remained was only Christ Himself.

Ashes are left from what cannot last.
Fire reveals what is true.
And what endures is Him.

Beauty for Ashes – The Divine Exchange

Isaiah promises that God gives “a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of gladness for mourning, the garment of praise for despair” (Isaiah 61:3).

I have seen both.

The ashes—of war, of failed ventures, of innocence ripped away. But also the beauty—faith not inherited but forged, presence not abstract but experienced, strength not my own but gifted in dust and fire.

Beauty is not decoration.
It is evidence.
It is the life of Christ springing from what death tried to claim.
It is the divine exchange—His wholeness in the very place of our ruin.

Hope

Ashes are what remain when all else is burned away.
Beauty is what God forms in their place.

If you find yourself in the smoke, wait.

And perhaps even now, in the ashes you carry, He is shaping beauty.