God of Ruin

For centuries, one of the big games in international tourism has been the ruins. Ruins of ancient Greece, ruins of ancient Rome, ruins of ancient Israel. We are drawn to the places where just a little bit remains, where just a small bit still stands. 

The thing about ruins is that they kind of look like what they used to be. The pillars may not be as tall as they once were. The columns might not be as round. But there's enough of the shape of them left that our imagination can easily fill in the gaps. Sometimes, they give us a picture of what something might have previously looked like, and we look at the little bit of rubble sitting in front of us and...we can see that. Our imaginations help us to understand what our eyes cannot quite see, but what our vision certainly hints at.

At the same time, many of us fear that our lives might one day go to ruins. We fear this because we live in a world not of ruin, but of destruction. We look at the aftermath of storms, which the news is more than happy to show us, and we see...nothing. Nothing but rubble. Dust and dirt and debris. Shatters and shards of things that once were. We look at piles of twisted metal, shredded wood, torn lives, and we can't even fathom what used to be there. 

That was a life? 

It is a life in ruins, but not the kind of ruins that spark our imaginations. This is a life destroyed. 

For those of us who are persons of faith, I think one of the fears that can quietly creep into our hearts is the fear that God is going to do this to us. That in His attempts to turn us into whatever He needs us to be or wants us to be or created us to be, in His plan to cast things out of our lives that are hindering us from becoming who He intended us to be, He's going to just completely destroy our lives. 

We get this idea that God is going to rip through our lives like a natural disaster and all that will be left behind is absolute destruction. Shatters and shards. Dust and dirt and debris. Nothing that looks at all like a life. 

But that's not what Jeremiah says. 

Jeremiah says that God can ruin without destroying (4:27). That is, when God determines to tear something down in our life, it doesn't mean it's all rubble; sometimes, it means it's just a bit washed away. Sometimes, it means the columns are still standing, that the pillars are smaller, but still formed enough that anyone looking at our life with a little imagination - including ourselves - can see what was going on here. 

The ruins give us a chance to see a bit of the original design without being all encumbered by the whole structure. They let us see the bones without all the fat. They get us back to the basics of looking at a thing and, with a sanctified imagination, seeing it in its fullest glory. They help us to retrain our vision to see more than what seems to be there. 

This is what happens when God puts our lives in ruins. We need not dig through the debris to try to find any little piece that might still somehow be intact; rather, we look with eyes of faith to see the things still standing and develop a vision for how they are the foundation of what fills this space. 

It's a dangerous prayer, indeed, but an important one: Lord, ruin my life, that I may learn to see (and appreciate) its fullest glory.