On March 11, 2005, Kevin Berthia went to the Golden Gate Bridge. Overwhelmed by depression and medical bills for his premature daughter, he climbed over the rail. California Highway Patrol Officer Kevin Briggs walked up and started talking. Berthia later said it was the compassion in Briggs’ voice that let him lower his guard. They talked for 92 minutes about everything he was facing. Briggs helped him see that his daughter, whose first birthday was the next month, needed him. Berthia climbed back over. Years later the two met again, and Berthia said the friendship works because Briggs never judged him. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer is a patient ear and a voice full of compassion.
Early managers at Yellowstone National Park saw wolves as nothing but destructive predators. Between 1914 and 1926, at least 136 wolves were killed in the park, and by the 1940s wolf packs were nearly gone. A careful survey in the 1970s found no evidence of a wolf population there at all. Over time people came to understand how the whole ecosystem fit together. After years of study and a record number of public comments, 31 gray wolves from western Canada were brought to Yellowstone in 1995 and 1996. What had been driven out was invited back. Some things we push out of our lives, like the hard parts of obedience, turn out to be part of how God keeps us healthy.
At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won both the pentathlon and the decathlon in dominant fashion. King Gustav V presented the medals and, as the story is famously told, called him the greatest athlete in the world. A few months later Thorpe was stripped of his medals because he had played minor league baseball, which broke the strict amateur rules of the day. In 1983 the IOC gave replica medals to his family but listed him only as a co-winner. Finally, on July 15, 2022, the 110th anniversary of his decathlon win, the IOC recognized him as the sole champion. Justice may take a long time. God sees what is right, and the record will one day be set straight.
NASA’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars on January 24, 2004. It was planned for a 90-day mission. At one point it got stuck in sand, and controllers spent six weeks freeing it a few inches at a time. In 2007 dust storms cut its power so low that all science was suspended, but after about six weeks it was back in action. It became the first human enterprise to travel more than a marathon on another world, and it kept going for over 28 miles. Opportunity outlived its expected life by 60 times. Its last contact came on June 10, 2018, after a planet-wide dust storm. A plan for 90 days became more than 14 years. Never underestimate what faithful, steady effort can do.
In the early 1900s two dams went up on the Elwha River in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. They made electricity, but they also blocked salmon from the upper river for about a century. In 1992 Congress passed a law to restore the river. On September 17, 2011, crews began the largest dam removal in U.S. history. The Elwha Dam was gone in about six months, and the Glines Canyon Dam came down in 2014. Today the Elwha flows freely from the mountains to the sea. Some of us have walls built long ago that still block life from flowing. God specializes in taking down what was never meant to stay.
