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.
A month after the September 11 attacks, workers at Ground Zero found a badly damaged Callery pear tree in the rubble. Its roots were snapped and its branches were burned and broken. Most folks would’ve hauled it off with the rest of the debris. Instead, it was pulled out and handed over to the New York City parks department. They nursed it back to health, and in 2010 it was brought back and planted at the 9/11 Memorial. New, smooth limbs grew out of the old gnarled stumps, and you can still see the line between its past and its present. Every spring it blooms with thousands of little white flowers. God specializes in bringing new life out of what everyone else counted as rubble.
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990 with huge expectations, and two months later NASA had to admit the images were blurry. The main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, too flat near its outer edge, with an error ten times larger than allowed. It was an embarrassing mistake. Instead of giving up, engineers designed corrective optics, and in December 1993 astronauts flew up and installed what amounted to a pair of eyeglasses for Hubble. The before and after pictures were stunning. The telescope that started as a punchline went on to give us some of the most beautiful views of the universe ever seen.
Jacob DeShazer was a bombardier in the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, the first American bombing of Japan after Pearl Harbor. His plane went down in enemy territory, and he spent 40 months as a prisoner, beaten, starved, and held in solitary confinement for 34 months. In the middle of that ordeal the prisoners were given a Bible to share. DeShazer came to faith, and he said God gave him new eyes, so that his bitter hatred for his guards turned into loving pity. After the war he earned a Bible degree, and in December 1948 he went back to Japan, this time as a missionary. A tract he wrote helped lead Mitsuo Fuchida, the man who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, to Christ.
For a long time scientists believed the coelacanth had died out with the dinosaurs, about 70 million years ago. They knew it only from fossils. Then in December 1938, a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange fish that had been caught in a trawl net near the mouth of the Chalumna River. It was five feet long, with steel blue scales and odd, fleshy, limb-like fins. She knew it was something special and wrote to fish expert J.L.B. Smith, who was stunned. It was a living coelacanth. It was hailed as the most sensational natural history discovery of the century. Something everybody had written off as long gone was alive the whole time.
