Yellowstone's Green Promise

In the summer of 1988, wildfires consumed nearly 800,000 acres of Yellowstone National Park. Visitors wept at the blackened ridgelines, the skeletal lodgepole pines, the ash-gray meadows where elk had grazed just weeks before. Rangers fielded angry letters from Americans who believed the park was ruined forever.

But the lodgepole pine holds a quiet secret. Its cones are serotinous — sealed shut with resin that only melts in extreme heat. The very fire that seemed to destroy everything was unlocking millions of seeds that had waited decades for their moment. Within one year, tiny green shoots pushed through the charred soil. Within five, meadows blazed not with flame but with wildflowers — lupine, fireweed, paintbrush — in numbers biologists had never recorded. The elk returned. The grizzlies followed. What looked like an ending was, in fact, an opening.

John saw something far greater from his exile on Patmos. Not a renewed national park, but a renewed cosmos — the first heaven and earth passing away, and the Holy One descending to make His dwelling among His people. Every tear, wiped clean. Death itself, unmade. The old order of things, dissolved like resin in the fire.

We live in the charred season, grieving real losses. But the God who seeds lodgepole cones with hidden life has sealed an even deeper promise into the fabric of creation. The new is already locked inside the old, waiting for the day El Shaddai makes all things new.