His hands shake rhythmically, back and forth, left and right. Minuscule crystals fall like rain back to the earth. Brothers splash in the water behind him, but his eyes remain glued to the task. He pours another sand load and begins again.

His daddy’s words from months before resound in my mind, “Everything has been taken off the table. Now we get to decide what goes back on.” We were in the first weeks of the world’s shut-down. As calendars across the planet were wiped clean, his words were poignant, “We’re all making decision from an absence. I think we’re creating a new median.”

I watch our boy now, months later — though to some these past months may feel like years. The sand falls through tiny holes in the plastic tray.

“Everything’s been taken off the table.”

He stares at the larger pebbles remaining, finds the shells, sets them aside for safekeeping.

“Now we get to decide what goes back on.”

It’s that same week I open to Hebrews 12:26-29,

“And His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heaven.’ This expression, ‘Yet once more,’ denotes the removing of those things which can be shaken, as of created things, so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.”

My mind runs back to the beach days before, my boy shaking, sifting, choosing, saving. Our lives but sand, our time but a flower. And why such a sacrifice of our comfort, for God to choose this shaking? Our present season feels relentless in the sifting — all we deemed important, everything we sunk our lives into, its facing those small holes… seeing what falls through, all that we may “receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken.”

Shaken to make us unshakable.

We face the sift that we may “offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe…” Our good and His glory, that’s what we’re peering into the remnants for. And not only the sifting. Our Lord takes it a step further then a child in the sand, for “our God is a consuming fire.” Taking what remains after the sifting, He then introduces the flame. We see it in 1 Peter 1:7, “So that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

And so, we not only welcome the sifting and the flame, we gaze expectantly into it. We await anxiously — not with anxiety, but anticipation — to watch how God will use the brokenness of this world and turn it over for our good and His glory.

“And not only this,” Romans 5 urges us, “but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

The sifter and refiner is at work, producing in us a hope which will not disappoint.