The Returning Green

On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with the force of five hundred atomic bombs, flattening 230 square miles of old-growth forest in minutes. Scientists surveying the blast zone called it a moonscape — gray, silent, utterly lifeless. Most ecologists predicted recovery would take centuries, if it happened at all.

But ecologist Virginia Dale and her colleagues at the Pacific Northwest Research Station discovered something remarkable. Within just one growing season, fireweed and prairie lupine pushed through the ash. Pocket gophers, safe in their underground burrows, had survived the eruption and were already turning over the soil, mixing nutrient-rich ash into the earth below. Their tunnels became seed beds. The very destruction had created conditions for new growth that the old, dense forest canopy had never allowed. Seedlings that had waited decades for sunlight suddenly had it in abundance.

Today, that once-barren landscape is a thriving young forest, teeming with elk, birds, and wildflowers that never grew there before.

This is how the Almighty works in devastated lives. We look at the ash — the failed marriage, the lost career, the shattered health — and we see nothing but ruin. But God is already at work beneath the surface, turning over the soil of our suffering, planting seeds that the old life could never have supported.

The prophet Isaiah understood this: "He gives beauty for ashes." Not beauty instead of ashes — beauty grown directly from them.