I wonder if God looks at what the enemy is doing in our lives today and says, “I'll use that for redemption.”

I was thinking about the two trees.

In the Garden, there was a tree connected to the moment sin entered the human story. Adam and Eve ate from the tree God had told them not to eat from, and everything changed.

Then I started thinking about Jesus.

Thousands of years later, there was another tree.

The cross.

The very thing used to hold the Savior as He died would become the place where the power of sin and death was defeated.

I couldn't get past the connection.

A tree stood in the story where sin entered, and a tree stood in the story where Christ paid the price to free us from it.

And it made me wonder about the things happening in our lives right now.

There are things the enemy has meant for destruction. Things that have hurt us, changed us, taken things from us, or left us looking at pieces of our lives we never expected to have to put back together.

I know what some of those things look like in my own life.

And I wonder if God looks at the very thing the enemy is using and says, “I'll use that for redemption.”

Not because what happened was good. Not because the destruction didn't matter. And not because God needed the brokenness in order to do something beautiful.

But because destruction doesn't get the final word when God is involved.

The cross reminds me of that.

What looked like defeat became victory. What looked like the end became the beginning of something no one standing there could fully see yet.

And that's what I'm holding on to.

There are parts of my own story where I can't see the redemption yet. I don't know what God is going to do with all of it, and I don't know what the finished story will look like.

But I know what He has done before.

So when I look at the places where the enemy has tried to bring destruction, I'm learning to leave room for another possibility:

God isn't finished with this part of the story yet.

And I wonder if one day I'll look back at the very place I thought was only destruction and realize God had already begun writing redemption into it.