The hills are burning, wildfires billowing smoke, turning the sun blood-red. There’s beauty in burning. Fairer sunrises. Fiercer sunsets. And after a season of fire, winter rains fall, then comes spring.
When I was a child, a field burned along the road my school bus traveled each morning and afternoon. I recall the night the fire happened. The loud ring of our telephone mounted on the wall. A man asking my dad, “Can you come help us stop the blaze? The fire crews can’t help. They’re all busy. It’s burning everywhere.”
I was so scared. So worried for my dad that night. Shovel in hand, he walked to his pickup. Hours later, he returned with blackened boots.
Neighbors put out that fire along the road in the 1970s. California rationed water all that summer. My grandma grew distressed over her dying lawn. But come autumn, it finally began to rain, and I noticed something that has stayed with me all my life since then. The field that burned that summer came back so much prettier the following spring. From my big yellow school bus, I looked out the window and marveled at that field’s beauty.
The Bible says, “For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver” 
Malachi 3:2-3.
The Levites were God’s people. To clean them up, God burned them down.
I remind myself of this as I weep and pray with God’s people. As pain makes us say, “We must seek God.”
In the 1980s, I watched a little old house burn down a few miles from my childhood home. Then came the bulldozer scraping the lot clean. After that, the owner returned and began to build. Something new. Something grand. Something beautiful.
With little old houses flaming in my life, I wait for the beautiful. Knowing God’s ways, I watch and hope. For the Bible says, “There’s a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace” Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.
And
     there
           is
            a time to burn ~