The Cathedral Rising from the Ashes

On the morning of November 15, 1940, the people of Coventry, England woke to find their beloved St. Michael's Cathedral reduced to a smoldering shell. German bombers had gutted the medieval sanctuary overnight, leaving only skeletal walls and a carpet of charred rubble. The provost, Richard Howard, walked through the ruins that morning and found two charred roof beams fallen in the shape of a cross. He bound them together and planted them in the debris.

Then Howard did something remarkable. He chalked two words on the sanctuary wall behind the ruined altar: "Father Forgive." Not "Father avenge" or "Father destroy." Forgive.

For twenty years, those ruins stood open to the rain and sky. But in 1962, Basil Spence's stunning new cathedral rose right beside the old one, connected to it by a glass-walled walkway. The architects did not bulldoze the wreckage. They let the old wounds remain visible while building something breathtakingly new alongside them.

This is the vision of Revelation 21. The Almighty does not simply repair what sin has broken. He declares from His throne, "Behold, I am making all things new." Every tear, every bombed-out ruin of the human heart, every grief that left us standing in the ashes — He does not forget it. He redeems it. The old passes away not by being erased but by being swallowed up in glory, as the God who is Alpha and Omega makes His dwelling among His people at last.