Trash to Treasure by Lisa Buffaloe

(This devotion was last published on March 13, 2014.) Today’s guest blogger is Lisa Buffaloe. Lisa is a writer, blogger, speaker, happily-married mom, and founder and host for Living Joyfully Free Radio. She loves to share with others about God’s amazing love. Lisa is the author of No Wound Too Deep For The Deep Love Of Christ, Living Joyfully Free, Living Joyfully Free – Volume 2, Nadia’s Hope, Prodigal Nights, and  Grace for the Char-Baked. Visit Lisa Buffaloe @ http://lisabuffaloe.com

My family enjoys the beauty of God’s nature. When we lived in Texas, the Japanese Gardens in Fort Worth were a tranquil retreat from the rush of the modern world. The artistic stroke and genius of our Creator were incredibly obvious as we meandered on pathways through seven acres of ponds, waterfalls, trees, and flowers.

The gardens seemed to have been there for hundreds of years as the plants mesh with the gentle rolling terrain. Exotic Imperial Koi unafraid of humans, beg for food pellets dispensed to visitors for a quarter. Squirrels, turtles, lizards, ducks, and geckos run free. Trees sway in the gentle breeze and water skips across the rocks of waterfalls.

My family visited the site for years before learning the land was originally a gullied bluff used as a watering hole for cattle, a trash dump, a squatter’s camp, and then as a gravel pit to build the streets of old Fort Worth.

Never would we have guessed something so beautiful could have come from such an ugly beginning.

How many stood over the trash heap of a life and declared that it would always be a trash heap?

God sees beyond the gravel, the trash, the squatters of sin, despair, and hopelessness, He cleans us up and then provides a place of beauty for us and others.  For in Christ we are new creations.

God’s forgiveness changes lives. We can trust Him with our past. We can trust Him to forgive, and when we do He renews our lives and recreates us into walking testaments of His grace and mercy.

Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it? Indeed, I will make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.  ~ Isaiah 43:19 HCSB

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” ~ 2 Corinthians 5: 17 NIV

Thank You Father for seeing beyond the mess and trash in our lives, and giving us new and living hope!

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