There’s something honest about calling this past year what it really was for many of us: a collection of failures and disappointments that culminated in something we didn’t expect. The ancient Israelites knew this feeling intimately. Their disobedience and rebellion led them into Babylonian captivity, where they watched their beloved Jerusalem reduced to literal ruins. The temple destroyed. The walls crumbled. Everything they had known and trusted lay in rubble around them. It wasn’t just bad luck or unfortunate circumstances; their own choices had contributed to the devastation. And now they sat among the wreckage of what used to be, wondering if restoration was even possible. If that’s where you are as this year ends, you’re not alone in the rubble.

But here’s what makes the ruins different when God is involved: He doesn’t look at the devastation the way we do. In Isaiah 61, God speaks directly to the brokenhearted, to those sitting in mourning, to people who know exactly what ruins feel like. His response isn’t to minimize the pain or tell us to get over it faster. Instead, He makes a promise that sounds almost too good: “They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”

Notice what He’s saying. God doesn’t just clean up our mess and help us start over with a blank slate. He takes the actual ruins, the broken places, the devastated dreams, the parts of our story we wish we could erase, and He rebuilds something from them. The wreckage becomes the foundation. What felt like wasted years became part of a larger restoration story. He’s not embarrassed by our ruins; He’s ready to work with them.

This is the scandalous hope of the gospel: God specializes in using what the world would bulldoze and forget. The places in your life that have been devastated for what feels like generations, those patterns you can’t seem to break, that grief that won’t lift, that failure you replay in your mind, these aren’t disqualifiers from God’s rebuilding work. They’re often exactly where He starts.

As you stand on the edge of a new year, the challenge isn’t to pretend the ruins weren’t real or to muster up optimism you don’t feel. The challenge is this: Will you let God be the Rebuilder? Will you bring Him your honest wreckage, all of it, and trust that He sees something there worth restoring? Stop trying to hide the broken pieces or fix them yourself first. Let 2026 be the year you give the Rebuilder access to your ruins. Because what He builds from ashes is always better than anything we could have constructed on our own.