The morning of the ash-fall felt like more dream than
reality. I rolled my bicycle up my driveway in the dark of the early morning.
My bike’s headlight illuminated the ash covering my van. My fingers left little
rows of clean streaks in the grit.
The world looks different bathed in the single beam of a
bicycle headlight. It is small, practically non-existent outside the tiny
splash of light. The ash danced in the light, catching it and bouncing it back,
pretending to be snow. I followed a van down a hill, and the ash shot off the
road behind it, ripped up in the vehicles wake. The ash billowed and rolled and
washed over me, filling my nose with an acrid sent.
The world was dirty when the sun rose. Dirty from the
ash, and painted dirty by the yellow-tinted sunlight filtered through the great
dome of smoke covering us. It felt like the world, all of it, had yellowed with
age like cheap plastic, was cracking at the seams and ready for disposal.
I don’t remember how many days passed between the
ash-fall and the first rain, but I remember the smell of the rain. It was fresh
and clean and beautiful. It fell in the night, washed the skies clean and
bright again. And then it and the clouds vanished like the super heroes from
old movies.
The sky, that ugly, yellowed lampshade, was made new
again. I rolled out on my bike the next morning under a sky as pure and clean
as polished crystal. There were stars above me, white hot pin pricks of light
dancing in the heavens. I rounded the corner near my house and saw the horizon
stretch red and beautiful. It looked like the horizon had been forged, and that
bright, new thing still glowed with the heat of its making. I traced the sky
with my eyes, from the star strewn blackness directly above me to the glowing
rim of earth in front of me, and I saw in the sky a word picture for rebirth
and renewal.
There are days when I feel like the sky looked under the
oppression of the world’s burning. I feel dirty and used and cracked and
useless. Fit for scrap. And it feels like that’s just how life will be now. I
will hurt and be hurt and become the sum total of the physical and emotional
scars the years carve into me. And then… well, then it rains.
I read this book called, “Waking the Dead,” and it felt
like that. Like rain cleaning a smoky-ruined sky. The author reminded me of
things I’d learned time and time again. That we are loved by God. That love is
real. And that we can be made clear and clean again. That we need not live life
as a mass of scars. That we can heal and breath and laugh and sing and revel in
the crystal-like purity of the cleansed sky.
I don’t want to give the impression that we can say a
prayer to Jesus and then we’re clean and happy and healed instantly. That can
happen, but usually healing takes time and work. And there are pit falls and
setbacks along the way. But there is hope in the journey. There is the hope of
healing. The hope of peace. The hope of star-filled skies.
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