The Morning After the Fire

On November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire swept through Paradise, California, reducing nearly fourteen thousand homes to ash in a single day. Among them was the small house belonging to retired schoolteacher Martha Oliver, who fled with nothing but her dog and a photo album. For months, she lived in a FEMA trailer, grieving everything she had lost — her garden, her late husband's workshop, the kitchen where she had fed decades of neighborhood children.

But something remarkable happened the following spring. Martha returned to her lot and found, pushing up through the blackened soil, a cluster of daffodil bulbs her husband had planted twenty years earlier. The fire had scorched everything above ground, but the bulbs had survived beneath the surface, waiting for their season.

Martha wept when she saw them. Then she laughed. Then she called every neighbor she could find and invited them to come see. Within a year, she had rebuilt — smaller, simpler — with a garden twice the size of the original.

The psalmist knew this rhythm. "Weeping may stay for the night," David wrote, "but rejoicing comes in the morning." Psalm 30 is not a denial of suffering. It is the testimony of someone who went into the pit and discovered that the Almighty had already planted something underneath the ashes — something alive, something waiting to bloom. God does not always prevent the fire. But He never lets the fire have the last word.