Fiery destruction and regrowth...

I know I've been mostly silent since I returned home from Montana...I've been thinking. A lot. This trip changed me. I know every moment we live is a change from what the last moment was, but...this is something else. Or maybe I just have more of an awareness of the change now. No. I'm different. I know that.

Most of it goes beyond words...it's just a sense in my spirit that things will never be the same. If you asked me for details and I trusted you completely, I still wouldn't be able to vocalize some of it. And I've tried. The words somehow get stuck in one of those synaptic paths and never make it out my mouth.

But I DO have stories to tell. And some of them, like this one I'm "fixin" to tell, will eventually be told. I've learned that when I hear or read something more than once in a short span of time, it's usually something of which I should take note. This is something I heard twice in 3 days while I was at Glacier...with some of my own perspective thrown in, of course.

Forest fires destroy thousands of acres of trees each year. Over 5000 acres burned in the Skyland Fire, right outside of Glacier Park, last summer. There are an average of ten fires per year, usually small and quickly contained, inside the park. If a forest fire starts by natural means (lightning strike), the National Park Service policy is to allow it to burn itself out. If they determine it was started by human error/intention/etc., they will take steps to put it out.

Lodgepole pine trees grow in abundance in Montana. They are tall and beautiful...and if you look carefully, they are often towering above burned stumps remaining from old forest fires. And that is because...

The pinecones of the lodgepole pine tree are coated in a dense resin. So dense that the seeds don't release unless the resin is melted away so the cone can open. Melted by high heat. From a forest fire. When the fire burns the existing trees, the resin melts, the pinecones open, the seeds release and...the "circle of life" begins again.

Hmm. So, God has a plan. And even when that original plan is thwarted, there's a perfect "back-up" plan already in place. Kind of echoes the creation/fall/redemption story, doesn't it?

And, of course, I bring this all down to a personal level as well. I've had several "firestorms" in my life. I've set some of those fires myself. Others, I guess, you could say were "natural"...or at least not of my own making--I was just in the path of the blaze...the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. Some of them burned their way through my life and extinguished themselves when there was nothing left to be burned. Others were put out by people who care, people who put themselves in the fire's path to help me.

But no matter the cause, the fires burned. Burned away things/people/ideas/attitudes I held dear...or at least held onto. And I was left semi-standing--a burned-out, smoking stump...a barely-recognizable remnant of what I once was. Dead. In the middle of a charred field. A blackened field full of...newly-released-from-melted-resin seeds ("forged in the fires of Mt. Doom" for you LOTR people--don't you love my randomosity?!). Fresh starts. Unexpected potential. The blessing of a clean slate and a new day.

And once again, I'm reminded that change, even that change forged by fire, is a gift. Part of the plan. A page in my redemption story.