When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, it flattened about 135 square miles of forest and buried the ground under ash thick enough to bury a car. A couple of years later, scientists tried an odd experiment. They carried a few pocket gophers by helicopter onto the barren pumice and let them loose for about a day. The gophers did what gophers do. They dug, and in digging they churned up the old, rich soil and the helpful fungi buried far below the ash. Then the scientists took them away. Six years later, the fenced plots where the gophers had been were covered with about 40,000 plants, while the patches nearby were still bare.
Japan sent only two athletes to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and one of them was marathon runner Shiso (often spelled Shizo) Kanakuri. The trip took ten days by train, and race day was brutally hot. Partway through the marathon he collapsed and was taken in by a local family, and rather than face officials and admit he had failed, he went home without telling anyone. In Sweden he was officially listed as missing for more than 50 years. In 1967, Swedish television tracked him down in Japan and asked whether he would like to finish his race. At 75 he went back to Stockholm and crossed the finish line with an official time of 54 years, 246 days, and change. “It was a long trip,” he said. “Along the way I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”
As a teenager, Charles Spurgeon was miserable under the weight of his sin and kept visiting churches hoping somebody would show him how to be saved. On Sunday, January 6, 1850, a snowstorm drove him off the main road and into a little Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. Only a handful of people were there, and the regular preacher never showed up. A thin, plain man, Spurgeon thought maybe a shoemaker or tailor, got up and stuck to his text because he had little else to say: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” Spurgeon later said that when he heard the word “Look!” he looked until he could almost have looked his eyes away. The young man who found Christ that day became the Prince of Preachers.
Louis Zamperini was an Olympic runner who survived a plane crash, weeks adrift on a raft in the Pacific, and brutal treatment in Japanese prison camps during World War II. He came home a hero, but inside he was eaten up with nightmares, drinking, and dreams of strangling his old guards, and his marriage was falling apart. In 1949 his wife finally got him to a Billy Graham tent meeting in Los Angeles, and he remembered the promises he had made to God on that raft. He gave his life to Christ, and he said the nightmares stopped. Later he went back to Japan, sought out his former captors, and told them he forgave them.
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese army officer sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines near the end of World War II with orders never to surrender. The war ended in 1945, but he refused to believe it. Leaflets were dropped and search parties were sent, and he dismissed every one of them as a trick. He stayed in the jungle for 29 years, still fighting a war that was long over. Finally, in March 1974, his old commanding officer flew in and personally told him he could stand down.
