Beautiful Things

This past weekend my family and I went on a camping trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.  You can read all about our trip and see some pretty amazing pictures on my family blog, The Farnsworth Chronicles.


What I didn't write about there was the powerful experience I had as we drove through the forest Saturday morning.  As we wove in and out of trees on the little off-road pass, we went through some charred sections of forest that had been burned in 2009.  What was so amazing was to see all of the life growing around it.  Aspens rising up to take the place of those charred and falling.  Beautiful wildflowers everywhere.  I couldn't get a particular praise song out of my head.  It is called Beautiful Things by Gungor.  You can download it HERE.

The song says, "You make beautiful things.  You make beautiful things out of the dust.  You make beautiful things.  You make beautiful things out of us."

For a few minutes I was lost in admiration of God's beautiful creation.  How even though this forest had been through devastating loss, it was being rebuilt.  The words "new creation" kept floating around in my head.  All of this new life around the forest floor was so inspiring. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ the new creation has come.  The old has gone, the new is here."

I think Jesus is constantly renewing us.  Refining us.  When we go through rough times in our life we can usually look back from the other side and see  that God was with us all along.  It might be something huge or it might be something that feels huge.  But there is hope in any situation.  New life will spring up.  

This video is my testimony of one of those situations.  A lot of it is taken from my personal journal entries.  It is a little long but I did it on purpose because the words of the song are so powerful.  Whatever you might be going through, big or small, I hope this encourages you to remember that YOU are part of God's beautiful creation and there is always hope.  Please pass it on if you feel led to do so.

WATCH VIDEO HERE