"From the Ashes a new life is born"....

"The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them."

(Psalm 25:14 TNIV)

And so goes the line from the Elevation Worship track, Oh Come to the Altar. It’s a song the Lord impressed on my heart in the late August of 2019. It came in a week where He set me aside to minister to my soul. There were many things the Lord whispered to me, but there remained a recurring and wildly uplifting theme to his discourse: Australia.

Australia was no stranger. I first voyaged there as a young woman in 1998, staying for several months, and returning for brief trips in 2000 and 2006. I had thought that such adventures were complete, but something shifted at the close of 2017. There, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I found a surge of desire to fly Down Under. Over the two years that followed, the Lord nursed that desire, just now and again, but always with clarity.

And so I found myself, that August, being taught by God that He had a plan for my life that involved Australia. How that plan would take shape or unfold was hidden, but Australia was assured. He gave me the song “O Come to the Altar” and I knew it was his soundtrack for the word he was bringing. I smiled at the line “from the ashes a new life is born”, thinking he had deployed a cricket pun to arrest my attention! When three months later, Australia burned with violent bush fires however, this line was infused with far deeper meaning.

As I began to pray over the bush fires at the turn of 2019-20, God began to stir my heart. I sensed that these fires were significant; that they were burning away and preparing the path so that His fire could follow. The fire of his Spirit.

I was not to know that August that just six months later, I would land Down Under for a nine month stay. On both my first and last Sundays in Australia, and never in-between, the worship team chose to sing “O Come to the Altar”. Speech marks over my stay; God singing over me and confirming His word.

The Lord was to share so much more about his heart for Australia, which I will express in future posts. It is my hope that these posts will encourage you to pray with fresh vision and faith for Australia, that they will stir your heart and reassure you that when we spend time in prayer and the Word, our God will surely speak (Psalm 25:14). He longs to partner with us.

For me, it all started with “from the ashes a new life is born”. The Lord is poised. Are we?

Copyright © Sharmila Meadows 2021

Scripture quotations taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, TODAY’S NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 2004 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, a division of Hodder Headline ltd. All rights reserved. “TNIV” is a registered trademark of International Bible Society.