GREEN SHOOTS: By Cinda Hickman

In August of 1989, my husband Warren and I set out on vacation, driving west to visit relatives in Idaho.

We eagerly anticipated the open spaces, wide skies, and vast mountain ranges we would encounter, geography so different from our own locale in western Pennsylvania among the foothills of the older, greener, and gentler Appalachian mountains. Crossing the intervening flat expanses of the prairie lands in the Midwest, we knew, would accentuate further the contrasts of our country’s awesome and diverse landscape.

En route we planned to revisit Yellowstone National Park. We wanted to see for ourselves the effects the forest fires there the previous August had caused. We could only try to visualize the aftermath of the largest wildfires in the recorded history of the park. An expanding mosaic of hungry flames had consumed more than 1.2 million acres of trees and plants, slightly more than one-third of its territory.

No picture or news account could have adequately shown us that new reality. We slowly made our way through miles of a wilderness, once green, now black and charred and sooty. We peered at the blue, blue western sky through a strange huge vertical Venetian blind, each slat yet another surviving forlorn tree trunk deprived of its limbs, its needles or leaves, its capacity to hold a bird nest or to supply shade.

But then, we spotted, here and there and yet again over there, a brighter color. Emerging from some of the least likely remains were shoots of green. In time and with careful human help, there would be a regrown forest, a national park ready to embrace wholeheartedly once again all of its residents and visitors, welcoming them to its unique offerings.

Years later in August of 2005, the forces of nature, this time wind and water, overwhelmed a large city, New Orleans, and its surrounding communities and countryside when Hurricane Katrina struck. The collapse of the city’s drainage and navigational canal levees proved to be the worst engineering disaster in U.S. history. Horrific loss and damage to life and property resulted. Another unique setting in our country’s geography, as well as a special cultural heritage and ongoing way of life, had been dealt shattering blows. In contrast to what happened around the wildfires in Yellowstone, relief efforts from federal, state, and private sources have often proved inadequate and unmercifully delayed.

Two years later, those individuals who have witnessed firsthand the continuing plight of New Orleans and its neighbors tell of mold and decay and debris still in homes and other buildings. Returning relief volunteers describe cutting through overgrown vegetation, helping to sort through recovered personal belongings, listening to stories of lives forever changed. No picture or news account could adequately show this new reality in the south. There remains a dark aftermath as black as those charred remains Warren and I saw years earlier in the west.

In this Advent season of the Christian Church year, among all the familiar Bible verses and accounts, the passage from Isaiah used to describe the lineage of Jesus catches my attention: “A green shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stump; from his roots a budding branch.” Then I learn about the second mission trip to New Orleans that the youth of our congregation are undertaking in January. I read the verse that is the group’s theme, Psalm 74:23. The Message states it this way: “Remember your promises; the city is in darkness, the countryside violent. Don’t leave the victims to rot in the street; make them a choir that sings your praises.”

A combination of thoughts as curious as the family’s collection of Christmas tree ornaments glimmer together. Green shoots emerging in a fire-eaten forest. Growing numbers of volunteers to rebuild a chewed-up city and countryside. A shoot from the stump of Jesse. Victims who can be carefully tended into blooming once again, swelling with songs of praise to the source of all Life. It is we, as people of God, those who care and give from home and those who travel to work on the scene, who are the signs of hope arising green amid damaged and blackened terrain wherever it is found, in the landscape of natural geography or in the human heart.