Hiroshima's Garden Where the Ashes Fell

On August 6, 1945, a single bomb turned Hiroshima into a wasteland. Scientists predicted nothing would grow there for seventy-five years. The soil was poison. The rivers ran black. Survivors — the hibakusha — wandered through a landscape emptied of every familiar thing.

But within weeks, something happened that no one expected. Red canna lilies pushed through the scorched earth. Oleanders bloomed in the rubble. The city that was supposed to be dead for a lifetime was already, stubbornly, coming back to life.

Today, Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park stands on the very ground where destruction was most absolute. Children play where buildings were vaporized. Families picnic beneath camphor trees that survived the blast and still grow, scarred but towering. Each August, thousands gather not to rehearse bitterness but to release paper lanterns onto the Motoyasu River — small lights floating over water that once carried the dying.

This is the kind of thing the prophet Isaiah strained to describe. God declared through him a promise almost too large to hold: "See, I create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind." Not merely repair. Not just recovery. A world so thoroughly made new that the old grief loses its grip entirely.

What Hiroshima glimpses in part, the God of Isaiah promises in full — a creation where sorrow finds no foothold, and life grows even from the place of greatest ruin.