Life Comes Again

Inside me has felt like a forgotten forest—scorched, razed to the ground, charred remnants of wood disintegrating at a touch.

Those big forest burns take time to grow again. A length of time you cannot put an exact date on, nor can you predict how it will grow. The ways of the natural wild are their own; for months it may lay in cinders, smoldering, tossed ash in the wind becoming their covering. After time, a green shoot will rise again, thin but certain. Another tree pushed up by the roots, steady, slowly healing and healthy among what’s been burned.

Why wouldn’t my heart and body be the same? They, too, have become scorched earth, shrunken, laid bare. Though the fires have gone, the wreckage remains, and it takes time for parts of me to breathe again. For all the small restorations expanding, making space for all of me, mind and soul, there is no estimating how long the settling, the making space will take Healing isn’t rushed, isn’t made known in a predictable fashion. It sits in the bruised landscape and settles when it’s ready, allows the earth to do its work.

Yes, I desire this making new after complete knockdown, but nothing about this rebirth can be rushed. I let the lingering signs of life lead me slowly each day, look for the miniscule changes, signals of what appears tender and growing, a new shoot breaking through the barren.

Life comes again. Regrowth is part of this cycle, God’s intended revolutions of the world and within. Nothing is forced; it shouldn’t be. Underneath the miles and miles of toppled trees and desolation, something stirs, awakening. Doing its part of growing again, when in the right timing, fledgling life begins.