The Waldo Canyone Fire. By the time it was finally put out last July more than 300 Colorado homes were destroyed. One person was killed, with nearly half a billion dollars in damages.
Like any disaster, it's one thing to see it on the web…or watch it on your flat screen TV. Quite another to be there.
On a recent trip out west, my wife and I decided to visit the ruins. The scent of burning is still in the air, months after the last of the flames were silenced.
What we saw was beyond sobering. Block after block of burned down homes, many concrete foundations entirely cleared of even a hint of blackened sawdust. The sense of nothingness was oddly gripping, inducing an almost sacred sadness.
Yet oddly, we saw random homes that were somehow spared the fury of the fire. You drove down the street and a list of the houses went like this: Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed…spared.
How? What could possibly have prevented these places from lighting up like torches as the monster fire gobbled up entire neighborhoods like prawns on a platter?
Then…it hit me: this is exactly what judgment day will some day be like. The majority of people whose names you've known and whose lives you've touched–their souls: destroyed. Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. And then—miracle of miracles…this one spared. Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. And then wonderfully, gloriously…that one…spared. Spared the fire and destruction of hell, an agony that will not cease.
And the questions again: How? Why?
There can be only one answer: Grace.
There can be only one response: Go. Go and share what Christ has done…and what Hell will do unless one is rejected and the other recieved.