My farmhouse was burned to ashes. Here's what it taught me about Easter

By Douglas K. Shaw, Op-ed contributor Tuesday, March 24, 2026

I’ve lived over 70 years on this earth now, and have experienced many stages and seasons of life, from living through a childhood in poverty to now stewarding the blessing of my own company. While the Lord has blessed me with bountiful gifts at each and every step, I have seen so much hardship around me. My own family members and friends have asked me many times about the point of life in the midst of suffering, loss and hardship.

Even as a Christian, these questions have plagued me sometimes as well.

The best answer that I’ve found, one that God uses to stir hope and healing in my own soul, came from a memory of one Easter long ago.

When I was in middle school, for a short while, I had the good fortune of living on a 1,200-acre ranch in central Washington State. We lived on the last ranch outside of a small cow town in the foothills of the Stewart Mountain range, but I had first lived on this same ranch when I was three years old, where my dad was the foreman on both occasions. In fact, he was the only paid employee, so bearing the title “foreman” was a bit of a stretch.

Life wasn’t easy, but living way out in the country had its benefits. We had three horses, two tractors, and miles and miles of sagebrush in which to roam. It was the perfect stage for a kid with a vivid imagination to enjoy his childhood, and I know I made the most of it every chance I got.

Sometime between our two stays, the old farmhouse that I loved so much burned to the ground late into the night when no one was around. All that was left were ashes where, for nearly a century, that farmhouse had provided shelter for generations of families who lived and worked on the ranch. In just one night, my favorite place, my home, was gone, and it would never come back.

Shortly after, a new house was built right next to the blackened pile of ashes with its charred wood and bristling, rusty, and sharp nails sticking out. When we returned to live on the ranch for a second time, when I was older, it was a place of extreme fascination for me. I would walk around the scorched pile trying to figure out the various rooms I used to live in and play with my sisters. By the time we had moved back to the ranch, blades of grass had begun to poke through the ash, mostly around the edges of the devastation.

One day, while circling the remains of the old place, I came across a flower, blowing in the ever-present central Washington wind. It was a bright pink wild rose, sitting at the top of about eight inches of a twisted and thorny stem poking out of ashy and barren ground. I did what many children do when they find an unexpected flower — I picked it, took it into the house, and grandly presented it to my mother.

My mom found a way to make the gifting of that flower feel like receiving a mink coat. As a child, seeing her joy and pride upon beholding its beauty and knowing that my first thought when I saw it was of her, made me feel like a better person. But my mother saw another way to reward my joy with a lesson of eternal significance; as a woman who practiced a very authentic Christian faith, my mom also had a way of making certain that her children knew the spiritual aspects of living.

We were only a few days from Easter, and upon learning that I had found the rose rising from the ashes of the beloved old ranch house, she helped me see this as a beautiful window into the resurrection. From death came the beauty of life. From sadness and anger at the loss of something beloved came a new joy, a new beauty that I could not have imagined when I was 3 years old. Even when it seemed as though tragedy won, and the ashes of the old building remained overlooked and ignored, new life was working underneath, waiting for the right moment to be revealed.

This illustration has been so vivid for me that even now, it is hard to remember the sadness of the ashes without also remembering the beauty of that flower.

I think oftentimes, for those of us who believe in the resurrection, we can get so focused on the ashes of our lives that we do not have a chance to see what beauty God is growing underneath. Even with our own Savior, His disciples were so scared and distraught at His death that they almost missed His resurrection.

As we look to this year’s Easter celebration, there are probably many ashes still remaining in our lives from this past year and beyond. Millions of families on God’s earth will be looking for signs of life after the death of beloved family or friends, and countless more look for joy to return after job losses, economic uncertainty and broken relationships. The lesson I learned so long ago from a flower growing in the ashes — the same truth shown so enduringly with the resurrection of Christ — rings true for your life as well: God is always at work to redeem beauty from the ashes and turn what the world meant for evil into good.

As we approach this Easter and look to the rest of this year with uncertainty in our current times and ordeals, we would do well to remember the words of Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25 NIV).

May you have a blessed Easter, and may you never forget the beauty of a flower growing in the rubble or the glory of a tomb left empty.