Why "After the Ashes"?

The casseroles ran out sometime in March.

I remember standing at the kitchen counter on an ordinary weeknight — four kids’ worth of dinner to figure out, a sink already full, and the particular silence of a house where the other adult is just gone. Not at work. Not coming home late. Gone. Joel had been alive a few weeks before, and now I was the only grown-up in a new home we had recently bought together, parenting four children we had chosen to adopt together, and he wasn’t going to walk through the door to help me carry any of it.

I want to tell you I felt faith rise up strong in that moment. I didn’t. I mostly felt the weight of the dinner hour followed by the bedtime routine, and how completely it was now mine to carry alone. Every single night.

That’s the part I think about when I picture someone asking why I didn’t name this something more hopeful.

Here’s what I’ve learned about ashes since then.

When a fire moves through a forest, it doesn’t only destroy. It clears — the choking underbrush, the dead things crowding out the light, all of it gone. And in the bed of ash left behind, something happens that can’t happen anywhere else. There are species of pines whose cones stay sealed shut for years, waiting; it takes the heat of a fire to open them and let the seed fall. There are seeds that will not wake until flame or smoke breaks them open. They were designed for after. They cannot begin any other way.

I am not going to tell you the fire was a gift. It wasn’t. I would give almost anything to have my old life back. But I can tell you that some things have grown in the cleared ground of my life that I don’t believe could have grown in any other soil — a deeper faith, a harder and truer kind of hope, a family I love in a shape I never would have chosen.

That’s why I didn’t name this something tidier. “Beauty” would have skipped the burning. “Hope” alone would have rushed past the ash. I wanted a name that tells the truth about both — that something was lost here, really lost, and that something is growing here too. Not instead of the ashes. In them.

I’m writing this from the same kitchen.

The sink is full again. The kids are older now — taller, louder, harder in some ways and easier in others. I’m still the only grown-up here, still solo parenting a houseful, still handing God the things I can’t carry, which is most of them. I haven’t arrived anywhere.

I’m not writing to you from the far side of all this, cleaned up and resolved.

I’m writing from the cleared ground. From the part where the burning is done and the building has started, slow and unglamorous and real.

That’s what this place is. I’ll write honestly about the losses — the deaths, the broken marriage, the dysfunctional childhood, the constant financial lack, the mistakes I made that I’m still paying for. And I’ll write just as honestly about what’s growing, because both things are true at once, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. I write from my Christian faith because it’s central to all that I am.

But if you’ve had to rebuild anything — a faith, a family, a life you didn’t plan for — you belong here too.

Pull up a chair. There’s room in the ashes.