The Cross in the Ruins of Coventry

On the morning of November 15, 1940, Provost Richard Howard picked his way through the smoldering skeleton of Coventry Cathedral. German bombers had reduced six centuries of English stonework to rubble the night before. Nothing but charred walls and a gutted nave remained. The great tree of English faith in that city appeared cut to a stump.

But Howard did something remarkable. He gathered two scorched roof beams from the wreckage, bound them into a cross, and planted it upright in the ashes. On the ruined sanctuary wall, he scratched three words: "Father Forgive." Not "Father, forgive them" — just "Father Forgive," because Howard insisted that all people, on every side of every war, needed grace.

From that stump, a shoot emerged. A new cathedral rose beside the ruins, and Coventry became the center of an international ministry of reconciliation. Most astonishing of all, the congregation partnered with Christians in Dresden — the German city the Allies had firebombed in return. Former enemies knelt together. The wolf, as it were, lay down with the lamb.

Isaiah saw this kind of hope centuries before Howard ever lifted those beams. A shoot from the stump of Jesse. A branch bearing fruit where everything looked dead. A kingdom where old hatreds dissolve and the knowledge of the Lord covers the earth like water. God's pattern has never changed: He does not work around destruction. He works straight through it, raising life from the very place the ax fell.