Paradise Lost and Found
I love this mug. It has a wide base and holds more coffee than it looks like. I like the combination of shiny and matte black and the handle fits my top three fingers perfectly.But that's not why I love it.
I acquired this particular mug in late January of 2019. I was with my son and a few others from our church, serving with Samaritan's Purse, helping those who lost their homes to the wildfire in Paradise, California a few months before. There was one open restaurant in that devastated town. The logo on the cup probably gives it away.The Starbucks in Paradise had been spared the flames and the company had installed an exterior water tank to enable them to serve the recovery crews when the city water was contaminated. I bought that mug as a reminder of beautiful things in the midst of ashes. I watched my then fourteen-year-old son grow up by several steps that week. I saw people coming in by the hundreds to serve people they had never met. I saw Tom and Rita cry when my son found a small silver bar which was a gift from a grandfather long passed away. Beauty in ashes.When I returned to Southwest Washington, I stopped in our local Starbucks to tell them how much it meant to us that their company invested in serving recovery workers. The manager began to cry. She grew up in Paradise. To hear from a stranger about the care being given her hometown was beauty in ashes.That phrase is a powerful one. More powerful when you understand where it comes from. It comes from the book of Isaiah, chapter 61. Worth reading the whole context:
The Spirit of the Lord God is on me, because the Lord has annointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of our God's vengeance; to comfort all who mourn, to provide for those who mourn in Zion; to give them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, festive oil instead of mourning, and splendid clothes intead of despair. And they will be called righteous trees, planted by the Lord to glorify him.Isaiah 61:1-3 CSB
There is another passage in scripture where these verses are quoted, Luke 4. Jesus quotes the beginning of this paragraph to proclaim to the world that he was the fulfillment of this promise. That in him, all of those things were made true.As we look forward, there is not a lot of clarity about where this crisis will go. We can assume that there will continue to be loss of life, economic consequences of both the disease and the prevention measures, and the personal challenges each of us face as we find ourselves increasingly stuck in our own homes.This is why I love my mug right now.It is a reminder that in a wasteland of ashes and twisted metal, the grass was already growing. In devastation, God's people were rising to serve. In faces filled with despair, one simple act rekindled hope. Above all the knowledge that when Jesus is a part of the story, there is always beauty in the ashes both today and in eternity.We can both acknowledge the pain to come and anticipate the beauty which will come of it. Those two often feel mutually exclusive, but God's word would disagree. Isaiah was written in times leading to exile, and God showed him the beauty to come. Jesus proclaimed liberty and life before surrendering his own on the cross.We can live the stories of hope which will be told when all this is over. Stories of God's church discovering it is far more than a Sunday service. Stories of the people of Jesus who rose to care for the least and forgotten. Stories of hope shared of life not only beyond COVID-19, but the hope of life eternal in Jesus Christ.Find your "mug". Find reminders of God's grace in the past and then live the stories of hope for the future.By His Grace, For His Glory,Shaun