The Cost of Being Undone

The love that refuses to leave you unchanged

Eucalyptus seeds only open after fire.

Not sun, not rain, not time—fire. Scorching heat. Air choked with smoke. A wildfire that leaves nothing standing. It takes devastation to unlock the life inside.

And sometimes, God works like that.

Not with gentle pruning or soft reshaping, but with holy fire. He burns through what once felt strong—clarity, control, resilience, identity—and leaves only what can’t be shaken. Not to harm, but to remake. Not to punish, but to prepare.

It doesn’t feel like love. It feels like loss. Like madness. Like cruelty. But it isn’t. It’s mercy in flame-form. A brutal, tender mercy that cracks open what was sealed tight—so that His life can take root where ours once stood, and what grows from the ashes is Him in us.

What we built was strong—but not eternal

We built our lives on strength. Not obvious pride, but quieter things: mental clarity, emotional resilience, competence, control. The ability to keep going. To hold it all together. To plan, explain, endure, understand.

None of these are sinful. But they’re not eternal.

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” (Isaiah 40:6–8)

Even our best efforts—our faithfulness, our wisdom, our strength—fade. They may serve us for a season, but they cannot anchor us. They were never meant to.

God lets the fire touch them—not because they were evil, but because they were never meant to bear the weight we gave them. They became scaffolding where Christ was meant to be the foundation.

“If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire…” (1 Corinthians 3:12–13)

That gold and silver isn’t just wealth or status. It’s anything we treasured as strength. Our insight. Our ability to understand. Our calm under pressure. Our faithfulness in difficulty. Even the relationships we leaned on for stability—for identity—for emotional ground when everything else was shaking.

Not sinful. Often beautiful. But still unable to hold the weight of what only He can carry.

And the wood, hay, and straw? Those are the things we told ourselves were wise, necessary, good. The strategies that made us feel safe. The backup plans. The rainy-day savings. The five-year plans and insurance policies and “just in case” thinking.

The structures we stacked with care—layered with logic and good intentions. They made us feel protected. But they weren’t built to withstand fire. They were kindling. The very things we trusted to keep us safe were the first to catch when the flame came. They didn’t slow the burning. They fed it. Not evil. Just unable to stand when tested. Useful, maybe. But not eternal.

So He removes them. And when He does, it feels like collapse. The mind falters. The emotions fray. The drive to fix or prove or manage fades. And in the silence that follows, we learn something we never wanted to admit:

We trusted those things more than we trusted Him.

When God Answers Prayer by Tearing Things Down

This is where the paradox lives.

We pray for more of Him. We ask to be refined, to trust Him more deeply, to walk in truth. We say, “Have Your way.” And then, things start falling apart. Not in punishment—but in direct response to the prayer we thought would bring peace.

It’s like a father carrying his child across rough ground.

The path is uneven—sharp stones, patches of mud, thorns pressing up through dry dust. The child wriggles, eager to help, to walk, to prove he can manage. He reaches out—for low branches, for the edge of a wall, for rocks that crumble in his grip. But nothing holds. The thorns scratch. The stones bruise. The mud slides.

One by one, the father pulls the child’s hands back—not in frustration, but in love. Not to shame him, but to protect him. He isn’t trying to teach the child to stand alone. He’s teaching him to rest in arms that won’t let go.

And slowly, the child learns: he doesn’t need to find balance. He doesn’t need to make sense of the path. He just needs to stay held—and let his father carry him through.

And this is what it looks like in us:

We reach for clarity—He allows confusion.
We reach for energy—He allows weakness.
We reach for plans—He allows disruption.
We reach for comfort—He allows the ache to stay.
Not because He’s cruel, but because He’s clearing space.

Because we asked for more of Him, and He knows: as long as we keep reaching for anything else, we’ll never really take hold of Him.

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength—but you would have none of it.” (Isaiah 30:15)

So He removes.
Not everything at once—just one thing at a time.
Enough to make us feel exposed. Dependent. Undone.
But never abandoned.

This is the moment where we’re tempted to walk away.
Not loudly, not defiantly—just quietly.
A slow retreat. A reaching for something familiar.
Because everything in us longs for something solid.
And He is asking us to stay with nothing but Him.

“Be still, and know that I am God…” (Psalm 46:10)

Not be strong.
Not be clear.
Not be right.
Just—be still. Be held. Be His.

And when we do, something begins to grow—not instantly, not obviously, but deeply.

“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (Hebrews 12:11)

And if the fire felt harsh—remember this:

“He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver…” (Malachi 3:3)
“When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” (Isaiah 43:2)
“These trials have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith… may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6–7)

This was not wrath.
This was love, refusing to leave you unchanged.

Faith When You Can’t Rebuild

Sometimes, faith looks like a field—freshly ploughed, but left bare.

The ground has been turned. The furrows are deep. Everything that once covered the surface has been broken open, exposed. And then—nothing. No seed. No sign. No instruction to begin. Just stillness.

This is the place where action feels holy, but silence is obedience. Where everything in you wants to do, to plant, to build again—but the Spirit says wait. And wait again.

It doesn’t look like faith. It looks like nothing. But it is faith.
Because it takes more trust to remain unproductive in the presence of God than to rush into fruitfulness without Him.

And it aches.

To wait in stillness while others move forward.
To sit in silence while others speak with certainty.
To remain in the undone while the world urges progress.

Especially when you used to be one of them.
You used to move forward too. You used to speak with clarity, with plans, with conviction.
You used to feel useful. In step. Strong.
And now—none of it fits. None of it holds.

To feel empty, unseen, forgotten—and yet still believe this isn’t punishment, but purpose.

Faith here isn’t loud. It doesn’t have answers. It doesn’t build or bloom or explain.
It just stays. Present. Exposed. Open to God.

“Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him… let him bury his face in the dust—there may yet be hope.” (Lamentations 3:28–29)

This is not defeat. This is surrender.

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.” (Job 13:15)

And still—hope waits. Not passively, but faithfully. Not despairing, but held.

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” (Psalm 27:14)

Not Just Surviving—Becoming

It doesn’t begin with strength. It begins with stillness.
Something shifts—not loud or visible, but real.
You realise you’re still here. Not because you held on tight, but because you were held.
And what remains in you is not what was there before.

This isn’t a return to how things were.
You’re not going back.
You’re not even rebuilding.
You’re becoming something that didn’t exist before the fire.

You don’t need answers to trust Him anymore.
You don’t need to feel strong to believe He’s with you.
You no longer cling to clarity—you cling to presence.
Not to what you know, but to who you’ve come to know in the silence.

This isn’t resilience. It’s not rising from the ashes in your own strength.
It’s resurrection. It’s re-formation.
It’s life that didn’t come through understanding—but through remaining.

“Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” (John 15:2)

He didn’t prune to wound. He pruned because He saw more. And because you asked for more. You asked for closeness. For truth. For Him. You just didn’t realise what that would mean.

Like the two disciples who asked to sit beside Him in glory—Jesus replied:

“You don’t know what you are asking… Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?” (Mark 10:38)

We cannot bear what He bore. But He lets us taste the cup of surrender—of trust, of refinement—the one that draws us closer to Him.

And now—you have. Not all at once, not perfectly—but deeply.

You didn’t survive the fire to return to what was. You passed through it so something eternal could take root. And what has taken root isn’t just steadier—it’s truer. It isn’t a stronger version of you. It’s Him. Alive in you.

You don’t need to prove anything anymore. Peace doesn’t come from control now—it comes from communion. Joy doesn’t come from certainty—it comes from abiding. Identity doesn’t come from performance—it comes from presence.

This is not the return of old strength. It’s the rising of Christ in you.

And now, in quietness, it begins to grow.

And the eucalyptus seed?

It didn’t survive the fire.
It opened because of it.

Cracked by heat, split wide in surrender, buried beneath ash.
No light. No rain. No sign of life—just scorched earth and stillness.

But something unseen had already begun.

Because fire was never the end.
It was the unlocking.
The beginning of something the seed never could have become on its own.

And now—beneath the weight of what was lost,
in the space cleared by surrender,
rooted not in what was stripped away, but in the One who remained,
something begins to grow.

Not a stronger seed.
A living tree.