Letter: Through Fire and Flood

Life is sometimes like going through fire and flood, which is to say, desperate circumstances and grief sometimes, many times, join us as uninvited traveling companions.

Our husband leaves, in fact maybe he was not really present even when home.

Our wife dies, and though the pleasant memories do indeed come flooding back, so do the tears.

Our home burns down, our business too.

The crises differ and the list goes on.

The Psalmist David wrote, “we went through fire and flood, but you brought us to a place of superabundance,” Psalm 66:12.

“Burning flames and raging floods,” writes Barnes in his commentary, to emphasize the extremities to which sometimes we are exposed.

To get beauty from ashes requires after all the rather obvious: a fire.

But this beauty? After the fire? After his departure, her death?

Ahead.

Ahead there is to be found, yet to be discovered, watch for it: a setting of incomparable beauty, a place not of abundance but of superabundance.

The Hebrew word – רויה revâyâh – in Psalm 66:12, to describe the wealth of water in the place ahead, occurs only one other time in scripture: Psalm 23:5 “runneth over.”

Like emerging from long in cavernous darkness, we find ourselves blinking in sudden brilliant sunlight.

Or like Enchanted Valley, a top-contender for must-do hikes in the Olympic Wilderness of the state of Washington.

At thirteen miles the forest ends abruptly and you find yourself standing awestruck at the grand entrance to Enchanted Valley, also appropriately named “The Valley of Ten Thousand Waterfalls.” 

Cascading down nearly everywhere you look are these showers of blessing to the hot and tired, weary, and worn, hiker.

My father and I climbed up to one of those waterfalls with a view, and stood in the pool, beneath a shower of cold glacier water.

Dear weary travelers, there is a place down the trail where are to be found “rivers, springs, and streams, in abundance.”

Superabundance in fact.

Though we pass through fire and flood, burning flames and raging waters, yet life and love, safety and shelter, an overflowing abundance of blessings await.