Beauty Restored

As you know, 2020 was an unprecedented year for all the wrong reasons. COVID-19 changed nearly every aspect of our lives.

By fall, many of us had become somewhat used to the “new normal,” but as if to add insult to injury, the Oklahoma City area of the United States of America experienced a catastrophic ice storm in late October. The trees still had most of their leaves, which were soon covered with a thick layer of ice. The combined weight of the leaves and ice was too much for many of them. For days, we could hear limbs breaking and falling day and night. I stood in my backyard and watched a huge tree fall on the back of my neighbor’s house. Praise the Lord, it caused only minor damage, and nobody was injured, but it certainly frightened the family! After the storm, the devastation looked like the aftermath of a tornado. Many people were also without electricity for days or weeks.

Down the road from my house stands a very large tree, tall and majestic, with beautiful leaves in the summer that become even more colorful in the fall.

After the storm, that tree was a sad sight indeed.

Its branches drooped almost to the ground under the weight of the ice, and one huge section of the tree had fallen into that neighbor’s yard.

I mourned the damage. As the sun came out and the ice began to melt, I was amazed to see the tree’s branches springing back up, many of them with the yellow leaves still intact. It did not look exactly as it had before the storm, but it was still beautiful. All winter, people cleaned up the fallen limbs. Many yards looked rather forlorn for several months, but with the coming of spring and the sprouting of leaves, the neighborhood began to look much as it had before the storm. As I looked at the transformation, I thought about how our awesome God takes our mistakes and the ugliness of our lives and cleans them up, often creating something even more beautiful than before from the devastation we go through. What a wonderful God we serve!

Robin Widmayer Sagel.