Beauty for Ashes

“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 instead of despair. And they will be called righteous trees, planted by the LORD to glorify him.”

— Isaiah 61:3, CSB

Today I received an email telling me that my late husband Mark’s old Google account had been deleted. After all these years, I suppose I knew things like that would eventually happen. Accounts become inactive, technology moves on, and pieces of our digital lives disappear. But there was something strangely final about reading those words. That account held pieces of a life that once was—emails, conversations, little fragments of a person who was here and mattered very much. And suddenly, another little doorway into that life was closed.

I think that is what made me stop today and realize that on September 22, it will have been ten years since Mark went home to be with the Lord.

Ten years.

That is hard for me to even write.

Sometimes I look around at my life today and almost forget how completely everything once fell apart. Not because I have forgotten Mark—I never will—but because God’s faithfulness has so completely transformed the landscape of my life that sometimes I stand in the middle of all this beauty and forget that there were once ashes here.

There was a time when I could not imagine this life. I could not imagine waking up without grief being the first thing I felt. The sticky tar that never left no matter how much I ran or tried to wash it off. I gave away anything that reminded me of Him. Faith, worship, scripture was all put in a box and left for Goodwill. Never did I think of opening a Bible again with joy instead of questions, or finding purpose on the other side of everything that had happened. I certainly could not have imagined leading women through Scripture, teaching others how to study the Bible, recording a podcast, writing Bible studies, studying theology, or creating worship music rooted in the Word of God. If someone had shown me this life ten years ago, I would not have believed them, because grief has a way of taking you captive for a while. When you are standing in the ashes, sometimes ashes are all you can see.

After Mark went home to be with the Lord, I did not just grieve. I ran. I ran from the God who had carried me through those years, and I searched for comfort in places that could never truly comfort me. I looked for security in relationships that could never save me. I wandered into beliefs that promised peace but could never give me truth. Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that the woman I had once been was gone forever. I thought I had wandered too far. I thought I was too lost to ever be found again.

I ran all the way to Indiana to start fresh. Hoping I could leave the disaster behind me. But our history always returns one way or another.

Looking back now, though, I can see something I could not see then: I was not outrunning God. The Shepherd was pursuing His wandering sheep.

On October 25, 2021, I finally came to the end of myself and asked the Lord to do something only He could do. I asked Him to raise me from the spiritual dead. And He did. Not because I deserved it, not because I had finally become strong enough, and certainly not because I figured out how to put all the broken pieces of my life back together. He did it because resurrection belongs to God. He alone brings life from death. He alone can take what has been burned to the ground and cause something beautiful to grow there again. He alone gives beauty for ashes.

For years, I read those words in Isaiah as a promise. Now I read them as part of my testimony. And perhaps this is something I understand differently after ten years: beauty for ashes does not mean there were never ashes. Restoration does not erase what was lost.

Mark is still gone, and I still miss him. An automated email arriving in my inbox ten years later can apparently still reach into that tender place and remind me of a whole life that existed before this one. There are memories that can reach across a decade and suddenly make something inside of me ache again. There is a part of my heart that will always carry the life we shared, the years we were given, and the man who loved the Word of God so deeply and poured so much of that love into me.

Yet there is another part of my heart that looks around at the life God has given me now and is overwhelmed with gratitude.

Maybe that is one of the strange things about grief: eventually you discover that your heart can hold both. You can deeply love the life God has given you now without ceasing to be grateful for the life He gave you then. You can remember without living in the graveyard. You can carry the memory without remaining captive to the mourning.

The ashes are part of my story, but they are not the whole story.

The whole story is about the Lord.

It is about a God who raises the dead, restores what we thought could never be restored, and takes devastated ground and plants something there again. Sometimes He grows something so beautiful that years later you have to stop, look around, and remind yourself, There used to be ashes here.

And perhaps that is why today’s email affected me the way it did. It caused me to look backward for a moment, and when I did, I didn’t only see what was gone. I saw the distance the Lord has carried me.

Every beautiful thing in my life today is not a monument to my strength; it is a testimony to His grace.

I am profoundly grateful for the love of Scripture that Mark helped cultivate in me all those years ago. Sometimes I think about the woman I am today—the woman who cannot seem to stop studying the Bible, who gets ridiculously excited about theology, who wants other women to discover the riches buried in the pages of Scripture—and I recognize some of the seeds that were planted so many years ago. In that way, I carry something forward.

But the Lord is the One who made those seeds grow.

He is the One who kept them alive beneath ground that looked completely dead. He brought me back to His Word, gave me a hunger to teach it, and gave me a new life. He receives all the glory for it.

Ten years later, I am not looking back at September 22 simply thinking about everything I lost. I am also looking around at everything God has done. There were ashes. There was mourning and despair. There were years when I could not see beyond any of it. But through every one of those years there was also a faithful God who never changed, and eventually there was beauty. There was joy. There was praise. There was new growth. There was life again.

Not because the fire was not real or because the ashes did not matter, but because the ashes were never beyond the reach of the God of resurrection.

Isaiah says, “They will be called righteous trees, planted by the LORD to glorify him.” Ten years later, that may be the part that moves me most, because I know something now about what it means for God to grow life out of a place that looked dead.

The tree is His. The planting is His. The growth is His. The beauty is His.

And all the glory belongs to Him.