Remembering the lessons of Mount St. Helens

This past summer, my dear husband took me on a 7500 mile drive across the country. Palo Duro Canyon is beautiful. And the volcano in New Mexico revealed the hidden treasures of migrating ladybugs and greener hills than even their own postcards as the area has had lots of summer rain like we did.

The Mount Saint Helens visitors centers help understand what happened there and the first one you come upon is built and funded by the paper company. It is the best, in my opinion, and its free. The paper company has been busy harvesting and replanting, and their hills of trees looked photoshopped because they are all about the same height and spaced just so. The two parks service centers go for the more "natural" look, and charge you eight bucks a head to view and attend a movie that ignores the people that died here. Nor does it barely acknowledge the ones who survived here.

One amazing lesson was how the trees became projectiles to take out more trees. The blast at an angle snapped nine foot in diameter trees off like matchsticks and hurled them into other trees creating a flood of trees and ash and mud that clogged the rivers and created a new lake.

When I read a blog the other day about the pain a wife was suffering when her husband lost his arm in Iraq, I was reminded of those trees. And how those trees did not have a choice. They became part of the weapons used to take out more. When a couple or a family experiences the horror of an act of terrorism that rips into the body and mind of a warrior, the wife and family often are called on to help and watch their loved one suffer numerous surgeries, nightmares, painful withdrawal from medications, and physical rehabilitation, and that wife or family has a choice to be strong, and lean on God for that strength and patience only He can give, or allow the murdering cowards who laid that IED rip into their family.

Dear Heavenly Father, Please be with those wives and families dealing with wounded warriors. Help them to be strong as they stand in the gap while their warrior heals from the physical and mental wounds. Help them know what to say to nosy reporters, and neighbors. Help us be part of the solution, not more of a burden. Please protect our soldiers in harms way. Please help them unearth the buried bombs before they maim or injure anyone else. Your Will be done. In Jesus name. Amen.