by Kat Silverglate ©2024

The drudgery of clearing ashes from a fireplace is lost on most warm climate folks. Sweeping them inevitably pushes a powder thin cloud into the air creating a haze that later settles on furniture, sills, curtains and anything moist. Vacuuming makes it worse. Protective gloves and a hazmat suit won’t prevent black smudges from appearing tatoo-like on skin and clothing.  The slightest breath wreaks havoc on any neat little pile you work tediously to form as a first step in the eradication of the formless, shapeless dark stuff from the crevices of your one ridiculous life. Surely if anything visible exists beneath the invisibility cloak of chaos, it must be ash.

So, when Zelma Colon uses this substance as part of a word picture to represent the major theme of her life thus far, I’m stilled by the stunning dichotomy between order and chaos her life-phrase captures -- “beauty from ashes.”

Most of us, when asked if our lives have a major theme, might stumble and bumble. Waffle. Debate. Add an ample dose of “umms” to our awkward thinking out loud. But she didn’t even pause. “Beauty from ashes” came out like it was sitting on her tongue waiting for an order to deploy. After fifty-something turns around the sun, it’s clearly the truest thing she knows.

In that half century plus, she’s been hospitalized four times: her own birth and the birth of her three children. No serious illness. No high blood pressure. No cholesterol problems. Just general good health. That is, until April of this year. The spring and early fall of 2024 brought enough time in hospitals, ER’s and outpatient clinics to earn her the highest status with urgent care’s frequent patron program.

“It started with muscle spasms in my upper back. I went to the doctor, asked friends to pray, did the things the doctors told me to do. But it got worse. So bad I couldn’t function with the pain. They eventually did a CT scan at the local hospital. I knew it was serious when they took me directly from that scan to the fourth floor – the oncology ward. The diagnosis was multiple myeloma.”

And while that diagnosis and rapid course of treatment were an utter shock, these aren’t the ashes Zelma is referencing when she looks back at her one ridiculous life. To the contrary, she sees this as the storm that brought a magnifying glass to the beauty that supplanted the ashes of her past.

“I’m the oldest of five raised by a single mom. Even though my cousin wasn’t officially adopted, mom raised her like a daughter. As the oldest, I just naturally took care of my brothers and sisters. Our larger extended family was chaotic. Lots of yelling and screaming and fighting. I remember trying to be quiet a lot. Trying to stay out of trouble. I felt like a little adult in a child’s body trying to keep the boat from rocking.”

When her mother remarried and moved the family to Lawrence Massachusetts, the invisibility cloak of chaos started to form the first tangible ashes of youth. Outside the plain view of her mother, her stepdad exercised discipline in a physically abusive way. She closes her eyes and lowers her voice when she remembers this season.

“I thought it would make things worse for my mom if I told her, so I kept quiet.”

The memory of the pain is visible on her countenance. That is until she moves our interview quickly to the early embers of hope.

“Something inside me knew there had to be a rescuer. In my mind, I knew there was a God generally. I felt He was with me. Things started to calm down when my mom got divorced and we moved. I found a book in the new house. I don’t know where it came from, but it was written for kids, and it explained who God is. Who Jesus is. Who the Holy Spirit is. I started to have a sense that there was a bigger order out there. It was the first time I knew the Lord had a name. I read it to my brothers and sisters and decided to start taking them to church. The five of us walked there every Sunday and stopped at an Italian deli for a sandwich on the way home. I felt safe at that church. Connected. God was honored in that place.”

She blossomed in school. Loved the order of her classes and the predictability of study followed by good grades. She won awards. Became the president of her class one year. Worked after school. Paid her way to a local college after financial aid fell through on the three other schools that accepted her. And then at 23, she decided it was time to leave home and make a life for herself. She moved to New Hampshire and worked her way up to management in the jewelry industry.

“I was doing well. Making money. But there was a void money and success wasn’t filling. I loved to dance. So, I started going to clubs, not to drink or do drugs. Really, just to dance. I was lonely and the club life introduced me to people and surrounded me with a feeling of belonging. I went clubbing so often that I started to need constant activity to prevent me from feeling alone. No amount of dating or dancing filled the void. I even went to palm readers to see if something good was about to happen in my future. I made some bad choices. It was a dark time.”

Hoping for a fresh start, she got a new job and moved to a new city and started dating again.

“I thought having children would fill the void in my heart. I had two beautiful healthy girls. Got married. And now it seemed like I had it all. Kids. An amazing husband. We both had great jobs with an airline. But something wasn’t settled inside. I was having nightmares. I still felt chaos inside. There was a man at work who kept talking to me about God. He worked in baggage claim. He eventually stopped talking and put a card in my pocket. It had the name of a local church with a map on the back. I shoved it in my purse. One day, I woke up feeling this deep need for change, dug in my purse, found the card, and got in the car. Thank God it had a map. I’m horrible with directions.”

On her first visit, she felt like it was a cult until the pastor seemed to be speaking directly to the chaos in her heart. On her second visit, the pastor called for those who wanted to receive Christ to come to the altar. She walked up but went back to her seat before the prayer. On the third visit, she couldn’t stay in her seat. In an instant, the ashes fell away. Gone. She got baptized at the beach. She knew what it meant to be washed clean by work she couldn’t do herself. She knew what it meant to receive a gift she didn’t earn but desperately needed. She was a beautiful new creation.

“Nothing was the same. The chaos was gone. I couldn’t stop talking about Jesus with anybody who would listen. I joined a church and got a group together to go to a homeless shelter to share and to serve. We went every week. I fell in love with the people there. And then God brought the ashes of my past to the light of my present. Here I was talking to strangers about the Lord while my stepdad, the one who was abusive, was dying. Finally, I mustered the courage to ask him if I could pray with him alone. He wasn’t well and seemed annoyed by the question. As I started to share, he started bawling like a baby. ‘I’ve never heard this.’ He kept repeating the phrase, ‘I felt it, I felt it.’ When I left his side that day, it was like a wall of bricks fell off my shoulders. I knew I’d forgiven him. More, I knew his own ashes had fallen. He received God’s forgiveness.”

Zelma’s family grew, not just because she gave birth to a beautiful son, but because she began attending a women’s group at church where she met more sisters and mothers and friends than she could handle. She wasn’t the oldest anymore and she certainly wasn’t lonely. God was flooding her with mentors and leaders and friends who had walked and would walk many miles in faith. That group carried each other, prayed for each other, served together, studied together. They became as tight as little stones stacked together to create a beautiful building where more came to find order in their own chaos. Zelma, who loves to pray, started to teach others in the church by her example, to go out ahead of each event, each plan, each situation like an advance guard trusted to cover the path ahead in prayer.

When those women, and others, independently describe Zelma right now in the midst of her cancer journey, they use words that sound astoundingly similar to the prophet Isaiah’s when he paints a word picture of those who will be redeemed by the Lord.

The most visible thing about Zelma Colon right now in the midst of radiation, chemo, hair loss, transfusions, infusions and surgery is not ashes, mourning or despair. It is beauty in the form of joy, unrelenting praise and unwavering faith. Those who have witnessed the Lord’s splendor on display through her trial say this [only paraphrases will work with this space]:

• During her cancer treatment, she cheered me on weekly through my own cancer journey, reminding me that I wasn’t just meant to survive, I was meant to thrive too… to trust that God’s plan is greater than the storm, and to live fully in that belief.
• She is an example of faith that has no human understanding. In this difficult journey, she is teaching us all who know her how to fight a good fight in total surrender to Christ. I have not met many souls that are anointed to deliver a message bigger than she is delivering right now with her life.
• She exemplifies a remarkable strength in her faith that is inspiring everybody around her. She radiates a powerful-courageous spirit that uplifts others.
• The only word I can use to sum up Zelma is beauty.
• When we visit her, she is always smiling. When we go, we leave stronger and blessed because of her confidence in the Lord. We went recently to deliver soup to her house, and she ended up preparing a full home-cooked meal for us, sitting with us and laughing. When I ask her about the journey she says: “I don’t know what the Lord is doing, but I am trusting Him. Adonai is working in all our hearts. I don’t want to interfere with what God is doing. God is doing something, changing us and walking with us. He is Sovereign.”

From Zelma’s perspective, the beauty of this season has come at her from the family of faith that has encamped around her bringing prayers, visits, meals, gifts, words of encouragement, sermons, verses, songs and more.

Our Mission this Month:

If you are receiving Mission Packs in the mail, you have a sticker in the shape of a wave with three crests and three sticky notes that fit together in an orderly fashion. Spend some time reflecting on chaos in your life. For each circumstance, write your attempts to bring order on the neat sticky note. On the back of each note write WASH… Focus on the word ASH in that word. Ask the Lord to bring beauty from the ashes. Or reflect on how you have seen Him do this.

And, if you are willing, please add Zelma to your prayers in October. You are welcome to send her one through our donation page under "Donate Prayer."