The Forest That Fire Unlocked

After the Yellowstone fires of 1988, news cameras captured nothing but ash and standing deadwood stretching for miles in every direction. What had taken centuries to grow was gone in weeks. Ecologists grieved. Tourists stayed home. The landscape looked like the end of something irreplaceable.

But scientists knew something the cameras couldn't show. Lodgepole pines — the dominant tree of the Yellowstone plateau — seal their cones with a resin that only melts under extreme heat. For decades, thousands of those cones had been hanging on branches, loaded with seeds, simply waiting. The fire hadn't destroyed the future. It had unlocked it.

By 1989, the forest floor was already erupting with seedlings. Within five years, young lodgepoles carpeted the scorched ground in numbers that dwarfed the old forest. The fire hadn't simply cleared space. It had triggered something entirely new.

John's vision in Revelation 21 is not a patched-up version of the world we know. When he writes that "the first heaven and the first earth had passed away," he is not describing a renovation with the difficult parts sanded down. He is describing a transformation as total and decisive as fire through a pine forest — followed by something more alive and whole than what came before.

God does not manage grief. He ends it. He does not contain death. He abolishes it. The promise isn't that He will make things slightly better. It is that He Himself will dwell with us, wipe every tear from our eyes, and make all things new.