After the Wildfire, the Wildflowers

In November 2018, the Camp Fire reduced the town of Paradise, California, to ash. Ninety percent of the structures were gone. Residents who returned found nothing but charred foundations and blackened earth stretching to the horizon. The soil itself looked dead.

Then spring came. By March 2019, something no one expected began pushing through the scorched ground. Wildflowers — lupines, poppies, and baby blue eyes — erupted across the burn scar in numbers locals had never seen. Botanists explained that fire cracks open dormant seeds that have waited decades underground. The very destruction that seemed final had actually unlocked life that was hidden all along.

This is the promise of Joel 2. The prophet speaks to a people devastated — locusts have consumed everything, the fields are stripped bare, the land mourns. Yet the Lord declares, "I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten." The rains return, the threshing floors overflow, and then comes something even greater: "I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh."

God does not simply restore what was lost. He brings forth what could not have emerged without the breaking. The Spirit falls on sons and daughters, on servants and handmaids — life springing up in places everyone had written off as dead ground.

If you are standing in the ash today, look down. El Shaddai, the Almighty, is already cracking open seeds you did not know were there.