When the Wolves Came Home

In 1995, after a seventy-year absence, gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. What happened next stunned ecologists. The elk, no longer free to overgraze, moved away from the riverbanks. Willows and aspens grew back. Songbirds returned. Beavers built dams. The rivers themselves — the actual rivers — changed course, their banks stabilized by the roots of recovered vegetation.

Scientists call this a "trophic cascade" — one restoration setting off a chain reaction of healing that touches everything. The whole ecosystem, from the wolves down to the riverbed, was made new.

John saw something like this, but infinitely greater. In Revelation 21, God doesn't simply repair one broken thing. He makes "all things new." The first heaven and first earth pass away, and what emerges is not a patched-up version of the old world but a complete restoration — a creation where the Almighty dwells with His people, where every tear is wiped away, where death itself is gone.

Yellowstone's cascade took decades and is still unfolding. But the promise of Revelation is that one day, the Author of all creation will speak, and every broken thing — every grief, every wound, every grave — will be swept into a renewal so complete that even the memory of pain will lose its sting.