Michael Lienau: Miracles at Mount St. Helens
Updated: 2 days ago
In this gripping episode of Amazing Greats, we sit down with renowned cinematographer and documentarian Michael Lienau. His life was forever changed by the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. At just 20 years old, Michael found himself trapped at ground zero with a small film crew during the volcano’s second major blast. This ordeal turned into a four-day fight for survival.
A Harrowing Experience
From melted boots and eerie silence to blinding ash and divine visions, Michael recounts his harrowing experience. It not only tested his physical endurance but also transformed his spiritual life. His powerful encounter with Jesus in the midst of catastrophe set him on a new path—one rooted in faith, purpose, and storytelling.
Michael shares how this life-defining moment led to a long career producing faith-centered documentaries. He also launched ministries and raised a family of nine with his wife and creative partner, Sherry.
A Journey of Truth and Reconciliation
From the volcanic landscapes of Hawaii to the streets of Tacoma, Michael’s journey is marked by a passion for truth, reconciliation, and the supernatural power of God. He believes that even in the darkest moments, there is a light to be found.
His experiences have shaped his perspective on life and art. Michael emphasizes the importance of listening to God’s voice. This practice has guided him through challenges and inspired his creative endeavors.
The Impact of Faith on Storytelling
Faith plays a crucial role in Michael's storytelling. He believes that every story has the potential to inspire and uplift. By sharing his experiences, he hopes to encourage others to find their own paths through adversity.
Michael's work has touched many lives. His documentaries highlight the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of faith. He invites viewers to explore their own beliefs and consider how they can impact the world around them.
A Legacy Built on Listening
Michael’s legacy is built on listening to God’s voice. He encourages others to seek divine guidance in their lives. This practice can lead to profound changes and new opportunities.
In his conversation, Michael reflects on the importance of community and support. He believes that sharing stories can foster understanding and connection among people.
Conclusion
Don’t miss this unforgettable conversation about divine rescue, creative calling, and a legacy built on listening to God’s voice—even in the darkest moments.
Listen to this episode right here:
Watch the video interview right here:
MICHAEL LIENAU AT A GLANCE
Award-Winning Cinematographer • Documentary Filmmaker • Christian Storyteller • Christian Testimony
Topics: Christian faith • Mount St. Helens • Survival • Miracles • Jesus • Cinematography • Documentary filmmaking • Faith and science • Family • Adoption • Racial reconciliation • Missions • Calling
His Faith Journey: Christian upbringing → Searching for a personal relationship with Jesus → Four-day survival ordeal at Mount St. Helens → Encounter with Jesus → Surrendering his life to God → Faith-centered filmmaking → Family and adoption → Using storytelling to share God's work
This Episode Explores
Michael's journey from a nine-year-old filmmaker to award-winning cinematographer
The four-day ordeal inside Mount St. Helens after the 1980 eruption
His life-changing vision of Jesus in the middle of the disaster
The miraculous rescue that came after he dedicated his life to God
Building a career telling stories of faith, disasters and God's work
Adopting five children and becoming a family of nine
His work in racial reconciliation, disaster preparedness and faith-centered documentaries
Questions Answered
What is Michael Lienau's Christian testimony?
What happened to Michael at Mount St. Helens?
How did he encounter Jesus during the eruption?
How was the film crew rescued?
What is The Fire Below Us?
How did Mount St. Helens change Michael's life?
How did he become a Christian filmmaker?
What is Michael doing today?
Podcast Transcript:
When the Mountain Exploded: Michael Lienau on Mount St. Helens, Jesus and a Life of Faith
Amazing Greats with Ric Hansen
Award-Winning Cinematographer, Documentary Filmmaker and Christian Storyteller
Ric Hansen:This is Ric Hansen, host of the Amazing Greats podcast, with award-winning cinematographer Michael Lienau.
We are live both from Fox Island, where I'm at, and Camano Island, which is also in Puget Sound, but farther north than I am, with Michael Lienau, who is world-famous for a whole lot of reasons.
I did my research on you, Michael, and I just kept coming up with new stuff. It was like, "Oh my gosh, look at this. Oh my gosh, more stuff." So it's been incredible to learn about your story, and I'm excited to share that with our Amazing Greats audience.
Let's get rolling.
You are a cinematographer. You've been since age nine, as I understand it, and that's where you got your start. But you're most known for creating the documentary The Fire Below Us, or Living with the Fire Below Us, which is a documentary on Mount St. Helens, which blew on May 18th of 1980.
Many of our viewers here on the podcast probably weren't alive then, but many of them were, and I was one of them. Everybody's got their story.
What were you doing on May 18th of 1980?
Let's start, though, with the young lad, Michael Lienau, who grew up in Southern Oregon. How did you get started as a video fanatic?
The Kid Who Wanted to Make Movies
Michael Lienau:Yeah, thanks for having me on your show, Ric. I appreciate this opportunity.
My mother made home movies of us boys when we were growing up. I had two younger brothers, and they literally made us seasick to watch because she was always moving the camera around.
So I said, "Mom, stop. Let me try it."
But I didn't want to make home movies. I wanted to make real movies.
And so I made my first movie, and I got so excited about it. I checked out a book from our elementary school library about how to make fun movies. It had little magic tricks you could do, like making my little brothers disappear.
So I was hooked.
I really believe it was God leading me into what He had for me and my destiny.
I went to my mother and said, "Mom, I want to make movies when I grow up."
And I remember she said to me, "Then you need to pray to Jesus and ask Him if that's what He wants you to do. Because I don't care if you're a garbage truck driver or you dig ditches, as long as you do it for Jesus."
That really stuck with me.
So I just prayed, "God, if You want me to make movies, then You open the doors for me."
I had this great English teacher in about seventh or eighth grade who let us write scripts and make movies for extra credit. Then she would show those movies in the classroom or in the cafeteria at lunchtime.
The television station found out about that.
One day I had a note that I had a visitor in the principal's office. I thought, "Uh-oh, what's going on?"
I went to the principal's office very scared, and it was this very famous radio newsman in our community. He was looking for a cameraman to go with him to news events and film for him.
He had gone to the high school. The high school said, "We don't have anybody here who's interested, but there's a kid over in junior high making movies."
So at age 13, an NBC affiliate in Medford, Oregon, hired me—a 13-year-old kid—to shoot TV news with this news reporter.
I did that all through junior high and high school, and they mentored me. The news director and assignment editor over at KMED TV gave me all the free film I ever wanted. They let me practice with it.
They were very kind and generous, especially helping out a young man who was interested in filmmaking.
I didn't want to get stuck in TV news, but guess what? My first job right out of high school was working for a TV station.
From Bad News to Good News
Michael Lienau:My father was a nuclear physicist, and he wanted me to pursue a career in energy. He said, "That's where the future is—in energy."
He wanted me to go to college, but I had more of a creative brain. I wasn't that good at math.
So I took this job more to appease my dad than anything else.
But I learned a lot. I learned a lot about life—probably a lot of things I didn't want to learn about humankind and just how nasty things can become.
You're reporting all the bad news every day.
I got really depressed about that until one night there was a terrible accident with several fatalities involved. I was very depressed about my job.
I turned on the television about 4 a.m. and heard this guy talking about how he was starting a good-news television station.
I thought, "I want to be part of good news."
It was Pat Robertson talking about this new network he was building called CBN and CBN News.
I said, "I'm a news cameraman. I want to come and work for you."
I just got a form letter back saying, "We're not hiring at this time. We're still building the center," and all of that.
My next step was to go to film school.
I was researching film schools and found one in California that I wanted to go to. That was my plan for the next few months.
Then, in the back weather section of the newspaper, there was an article about seismic tremors around Mount St. Helens that might lead to something volcanic.
I don't know. Something about that article made me think, "I want to be there."
Maybe it was the newsman in me. Maybe it was the fact that I'd been living in the Pacific Northwest and all these volcanoes were around us. They all seemed pretty dormant to me, but this one was doing something.
I was drawn to what was happening.
These were the early days in March and April of 1980.
I went up with my camera and started filming some of the very early ash and steam eruptions that were happening.
I caught one big eruption and I was very close to it. We had been escorted in by the Forest Service, and I sold the footage to ABC News.
I was hooked.
I thought, "Something big is going to happen here."
I just knew it.
So I spent a lot of time there waiting for that.
And guess what?
May 18th, 1980, happened.
Mount St. Helens erupted in this cataclysmic eruption.
Fortunately, I wasn't there.
I went up there right away with my camera and started filming the devastation around the mountain.
I called this production company in Seattle that we'd previously made contact with and asked if they needed any help.
They said, "Yes. We need a cameraman to go to Boeing Field and follow that black ash cloud as it's going across the state."
In those days, nobody knew that wasn't a smart thing to do.
I went to Boeing Field, got into this helicopter—it was all warmed up and ready for me—and as soon as I got there, we took off and started flying into the black cloud.
We flew across Seattle and over the mountain range, and then we saw the black cloud and flew into it.
It made the pilot very nervous.
He landed in a restaurant parking lot in Wenatchee, Washington.
I pointed my camera up in the sky and filmed it turning day to night. It was just like a blanket going over the sky.
The pilot said, "This is nuts. Let's go back to Seattle."
So we started flying back, and the engine quit in the helicopter.
Now, when you're in the air and the engine quits, it's pretty scary.
He said, "Relax. I had to do this all the time in Vietnam."
So we're coming down in autorotation, and he sees I-90.
We actually landed right on Interstate 90.
Fortunately, the State Patrol had already closed the freeway, but they were not happy with us landing our helicopter on the freeway.
They came up, got a tow truck and got the helicopter out of there. They took me into town and I rented a car.
I drove back on Interstate 90, which was totally closed, totally blacked out.
I felt like the last man on Earth.
There were no cars. It was very scary driving through that thick ash.
I got back to Seattle. The producer took my film and went to L.A. He was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson that night.
So my film was on Johnny Carson.
He came back and said to me, "I really like your filming style. I want you to go into the volcano with me."
I'm like, "What does that mean? Go into the volcano with you?"
I called my mother and said, "What do you think?"
She said, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say you want to do, but I'll be praying for you."
So I got her approval through prayer.
We made plans, a few days after the big eruption, to go in and be the first camera crew to film the devastation around the mountain.
Four Hours That Became Four Days
Ric Hansen:We're talking with cinematographer Michael Lienau, who directed the award-winning documentary The Fire Below Us on the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
Was there a group of folks that went in with you? People you knew or didn't know?
Michael Lienau:There was a production company in Seattle. I had just met the producer-director of that production company.
My friend Joel was a sound man, so he hired him. I was the cinematographer. There was a still photographer—a very famous still photographer—and a grip, somebody who carried all the extra equipment.
Our plan was just to go in for four hours on one day and film around where we thought Harry Truman had last been.
But we didn't know that the whole mountain had come down and buried all of that area under hundreds of yards of volcanic debris.
We went in thinking, "Okay, if we need to get out of here, we have a ground-to-air walkie-talkie. We have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C."
I'll never forget what it was like to fly in there.
The first thing I noticed was that it was deathly silent.
There was no sound.
I was used to growing up in the Pacific Northwest where the trees were blowing, and you could always hear the rustling of the leaves. You could hear birds and animals and things.
But you couldn't hear anything.
It was deathly silent.
It was like we came into the upside down. If you ever saw Stranger Things, that's what it felt like.
It looked like that.
Ric Hansen:Yeah.
Michael Lienau:Ash was still blowing around, and it was very eerie.
We kind of ended up walking around in circles. We didn't realize that the heavy magnetism in the ash caused our compass to literally spin around in circles.
We ended up walking around in circles and got disoriented and lost.
We didn't even know where to catch our helicopter ride out.
We had also left the batteries for the walkie-talkie on the ground, so we had no communication with the helicopter.
We were forced to spend the night.
There was a full moon that night. The moonlight shot down and bounced off the grayish ash, and it was just like a very scary movie set—like a vampire was going to jump out of a corner at us any minute.
Ric Hansen:Yeah, no kidding.
At this point, are you thinking this has now become a life-and-death kind of scenario?
The Second Eruption
Michael Lienau:Not yet.
We thought, "In the morning we'll touch base with our helicopter and we'll get out of there."
But then the next day was very interesting.
We ended up really trapped in there and not able to get out.
We were forced to spend another night.
This second night was May 25th, and it was at 2:39 a.m. on May 25th that Mount St. Helens erupted in the second-largest eruption.
We were right underneath it when it blew.
People heard the blast 200 or 300 miles away.
We didn't hear it at all.
It shot right over our heads. It was totally silent where we were.
The sound boom went all the way up, hit the stratosphere, bounced off of that, and people hundreds of miles away heard it.
For seven or eight hours, we looked up and the sky was bright colors because the static electricity and the ash created these three- to five-mile-long sheets of lightning.
The lightning flashing through the ash created these very effervescent colors—green and orange and purple and pink.
It just did this all night.
We thought, "Any minute the volcano is going to wipe us out. It's just going to wipe us out like it did all the other people."
I grew up going to church. I grew up in a Christian family. We went to a very traditional church.
But I really didn't know how to connect with God.
All I knew how to do was pray, "God, help."
That's about all I knew.
I started doing some real serious soul-searching then.
The next day was really miserable.
When the volcano erupted, the temperatures plummeted to freezing.
Not only did all this ash come down on us, but as it was coming down on us, it became increasingly difficult to breathe.
I remember thinking, "We're going to be buried like the people in Pompeii."
And I prayed, "God, help me breathe."
Another very simple prayer.
Pretty soon it started raining, and the rain mixed in with the ash. It came down like wet, hot mud falling from the sky.
That actually cleared out the air so we could breathe.
But then it started snowing and raining with this weather system that it sucked in, and it just became this slurry of hot, wet, cement-like substance.
It became very difficult to walk in.
By this time we'd already been in there for two full days, and we'd only planned on being there for four hours.
We had no food.
We had one canteen of fresh water and five of us on the crew.
And we had one little baggie of GORP mix—peanuts and carob mix.
That's it.
That's all we had.
And that was gone after the first few hours, really.
Ric Hansen:Of course. Of course. No vegetation. There was nothing around.
Michael Lienau:Absolutely nothing there.
But there was fresh artesian water bubbling up out of the ground.
All these glaciers had come down and were buried under this hot ash, and it was forcing the water up through the ash.
There were little geysers of fresh water, and we would just put our canteen there and drink the fresh water.
So we were very fortunate to have that.
But we were also very cold—freezing temperatures at this point.
We were up in the Mount Margaret area. It was freezing.
When the Crew Became the Story
Ric Hansen:The visual that I have from the documentary is that of the two trees that cross. Was that at this particular point? It looked like a cross on a hillside.
Narrator:The new eruption draped the mountain with a heavy fog, inhibiting any search and rescue.
On that third day, the National Guard called the families of the film crew to say that they were missing and presumed dead.
But for Lienau and the other crew members, the ordeal was only half through.
Every hour seemed like an eternity up there.
Michael Lienau:Each step became increasingly more difficult, and we would get stuck in the ash.
As we fell through it, it would burn my feet, my legs, all the way up to my hip.
The more that we tried to get out, the more we realized that we were prisoners.
Slowly, it was dawning on us that we were becoming our own story.
Narrator:The hot, cement-like mud melted boots and clung heavily to clothing, draining even more energy from the fatigued crew.
Crawling up and over the charred, splintered forest now became a living nightmare.
On the evening of the fourth day, they attempted to make camp just a few miles from where they had begun.
Michael Lienau:Every bone, every muscle in my body was aching, and all I wanted to do was lay down and go to sleep.
We were talking about hypothermia and how dangerous it was, and we tried to keep everybody awake.
We were fighting fatigue and exhaustion.
We'd been trapped in there for two going on three days.
We were traveling over these trees. It was so hard to get over this terrain because there would be these large banks of ash that had been blown into the hillside, and there were trees and snags underneath that ash.
I think because I was the youngest, maybe they made me go first on those.
They would say, "You go across there. If you make it, then we'll follow your track. If you don't, we'll find another way."
One time I actually fell through all the way up to my hips and I couldn't get out.
The volcano was 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit when the ash came out of it, and it was still very hot under that ground.
The soles of my boots were melting.
They actually broke off, and I had to tie them back together with twine.
There was one point where I was trapped, and my friend had to crawl on all fours to come and help dig me out.
Then we had to really go on all fours, trying to crawl through that.
That's just how difficult it was.
You had this whole huge forest, and every tree was laid down. You had to climb up and over and around these trees, and it was incredibly difficult to try to get anywhere.
Here we were, trapped really in ground zero, right where the major destruction from the volcano had happened.
We were trapped. We could not get out of there.
I was physically exhausted.
I was 20 years old. I had a lot of energy in those days, but I was so exhausted. Every muscle, every bone, every ligament in my body was aching.
At one point, I leaned against a tree with my backpack on, and I fell asleep or something.
But I had this vision.
I saw this man coming across this ash field, and he was carrying one of those broken trees.
As he got closer, I saw he was very badly wounded.
He had chunks of flesh hanging off his face. He was all bloodied and beaten up—just a bloody mess.
As he got closer to me, I realized that it was Jesus on the way to Calvary.
At one point He stopped and stared right at me.
His eyes just pierced right into my eyes.
As He did, I felt this tremendous surge of life come into me.
I woke up from this dream—or whatever I was experiencing there—and I had what felt like a full breakfast and a full night's sleep.
I had full energy.
I started hiking and found this little cave.
The other guys followed me, and we crawled into this cave.
It was a cave of trees that had been blasted against the side of a hill and created this little pocket.
We were able to crawl into that and get away from some of that weather.
We tried to put some twigs and branches together to make a fire.
It was really difficult to make a fire because everything had been blasted off the trees, and it was so wet and muddy that it was hard to start a fire.
For the first time, we were able to make a little fire there and kind of regroup.
When I had that experience, I had this feeling of floating away from my body.
That's when I had that vision of Jesus walking across that ash field.
It was an encounter with Jesus that I'll never forget.
It was like it happened last week.
It just really changed my life because it made what I'd been learning about in Sunday school and everything else very real to me.
But I really didn't know the Lord.
Even there at Mount St. Helens, the thing that scared me the most wasn't the fact that the volcano could erupt at any minute and wipe us out.
It was the fact that I did not know that if I was to die there—if it erupted and wiped us out—that if I died there, would I be in heaven or hell?
I couldn't answer that question with any certainty.
And so my prayer was, "Lord, if You're real, help us get out of here."
And that's when I had that vision of Jesus.
"Neither Height Nor Depth"
Ric Hansen:Ric Hansen here on Amazing Greats with Michael Lienau, who, with his wife Sherry, has made a career producing faith-centered documentaries.
Michael Lienau:Once we were in the cave, I remembered that my dad had given me this little tiny pocket Bible before I went in.
I'd forgotten about it until that moment.
I pulled it out, and I wanted to read something that was going to be encouraging.
Something like, "You will be rescued in your day of disaster," or something like that.
Instead, I opened it and it said:
"For your sake, we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered all the day long."
Oh no.
That was not very encouraging.
Ric Hansen:No.
Michael Lienau:But I went on, and it said that nothing—neither height nor depth, nor all of creation—would be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
From that moment on, after that experience of encountering Jesus and that Scripture, I had total peace.
No matter what happened, whether I lived or died, I knew that I would be with the Lord.
That really shaped my life and my faith in that moment right there.
"Lord, I'll Dedicate the Rest of My Life to You"
Ric Hansen:And you made a pledge somewhere along the way during that prayer time. Was that when that happened?
Michael Lienau:Yeah.
The next day we were trying to hike out of there, but we were still 22 miles away from anything.
That night, an avalanche came down and almost buried us.
A large mudflow came down off the mountain—the unstable ash—and we had to scurry out of there.
Then we had to hike freezing cold and soaking wet again.
We found another little cave of trees and were able to crawl into that.
It was getting late, late in the day.
This was the fourth day that we were trapped in there.
I remember staring at the fire and thinking, "Man, are we ever going to get out of here?"
I was hearing the whir of a helicopter, and it's like a mental image of a helicopter came to my mind.
So I jumped out of this little cave.
For the first time, the fog had lifted a little bit, and I looked down this valley.
For the first time, we could see down at the bottom of the valley.
It was 2,000 feet below us.
I saw a Huey helicopter go up the valley, another one following it, and then I saw them leave.
They were leaving out to the left.
When I saw them leave, I just saw our chance of ever getting out of there—maybe even alive—go with them.
That's when I fell down on my hands and knees and said:
"Lord, I'm 20 years old. I'll dedicate the rest of my life to serving You if You get us out of this mess that we got ourselves into."
I'm not sure how much time went on, but I heard an audible voice speak to me.
All it said was:
"Michael, look up to your left."
It scared me.
I looked around. There was nobody standing around me.
I looked over to my left, and sure enough, I saw all the broken trees.
One of them had branches broken in the shape of a cross.
That's where I saw the helicopter rise right over where that cross was.
They looked like angels coming out of the sky—those helicopters. A Huey helicopter followed by another one.
They came over and saw me standing out there.
They hovered, dropped down some flares, and took off.
They had to find a safe place to land because we were on a hillside.
They found a place, and these pararescue guys came down in these big orange flight jackets.
They gave us great big bear hugs and said, "You don't know how happy we are to find you."
I said, "You want to make a bet?"
They had been pulling out body bags.
We were the first live rescues that they were able to do there.
It was Air Force rescue, and I'm just so thankful for them and how they risked their lives even to come up and find us.
There was a tight weather window in which they could fly in and see if we were still alive or not.
The military had called my mother and said, "Your son is missing and presumed dead."
She started a prayer chain.
She had gone through all of this not knowing whether we were alive or not.
My dad was out fishing the whole time. He didn't even know any of this until he came home.
There were news vehicles everywhere.
They said, "We have to hurry to get out of here because there's another storm coming in. If we don't get out of here, we're going to all be spending the night here."
As those helicopters lifted off from Mount St. Helens, I sensed the Lord saying to me that this wasn't for me.
This was so that His name would be glorified.
That was really the beginning of my hearing the voice of the Lord.
I think He was drawing me at a very early age, and He drew me to Mount St. Helens because of the things that He wanted to teach me about life and faith and really hearing the voice of the Lord—and how important that would be for the rest of my life.
And He's certainly done that in every aspect, every step of my life.
Coming Home: A New Mission
Ric Hansen:So you're now home—or you're off the mountain anyway.
Obviously, it was a tremendous relief, and also, like you say, a kind of coming to Jesus and really getting to know Him and having a serious relationship with the Lord.
But the next steps, in real life, what did that look like?
Were you on the news? Were people talking to you? Was there a hubbub about your experience?
How did that look?
Michael Lienau:It was very humbling coming off of that.
Here we'd been trapped in there for four days, and we'd been put on the missing and presumed-dead list.
They didn't see any way we could have survived that second eruption.
But by the grace of God, it was just a vertical eruption, not vertical and horizontal like the first one. They were just learning all of this at that time.
When we were finally taken to the rescue center, the air rescue team read our vitals and said we were very fortunate to be out of there because we probably could not have survived another night—with hypothermia or whatever.
The weather was really bad.
It was snowing. It was freezing up there.
Everybody on the team went back to Seattle, but I stayed in Portland, Oregon, because I was the cameraman.
The producer worked out a deal with ABC News and told them that if they cleaned his cameras, they could have the exclusive first look at our footage.
They said, "Michael, since you've shot the footage, you need to go to Portland and help them edit that."
Here we had just been through this ordeal. We hadn't eaten anything for four days.
And yet I had to go to Portland, Oregon, to help them edit the film for the news that night.
They finally gave me a hamburger and put me up in a hotel.
The next morning, the whole hallway was filled with news reporters because Portland was where all the major news outlets had their headquarters covering Mount St. Helens.
We were the latest news—the new missing hikers who had been found.
We had all this footage we'd just shot of what it was like to walk around in there from the ground.
They asked me what it was like, and I was still in shock.
It was really hard to put words together.
Until one of the reporters came into the room and said, "I know you had a spiritual experience there, and I want to hear about it."
This was a network news reporter.
It kind of unlocked that opportunity for me to begin sharing what it was like—the humbling experience that it was.
It was very humbling.
The thing is, all my life I'd been wanting to go to Hollywood to make movies.
But none of that mattered anymore.
All I wanted to do was get to know the Lord and this newfound faith that I had found there.
Even though I'd been a Christian, I really didn't know a personal relationship with Jesus.
I always say, "Don't wait until you have a Mount St. Helens experience or a major catastrophe in your life. Get to know Jesus before that happens."
He'll use opportunities like that to help us.
For me, it's like a milestone.
It's like the Lord telling Israel to leave memorial stones there so they won't forget.
We still forget, and we still have to be reminded.
But it's a memorial stone that I'll never forget.
Every opportunity I have to share it reminds me of that, too.
Now I get to tell this story to my grandchildren and hopefully my children's children—my great-grandchildren someday—about what God did in my life there.
It seems like every night when they come and stay over, or I'm with them, they always want me to tell them the volcano story.
I'm like, "Don't you get tired of that?"
"No, Papa. Your story is always new every time."
Did You Keep the Melted Boots?
Ric Hansen:Yeah, yeah.
So the question of the day is: Did you keep your melted boots?
Do you have those?
Michael Lienau:No.
I was going to.
I had them all wrapped in a plastic bag, but my dad smelled them one time.
They smelled so awful that he threw them in the garbage.
Ric Hansen:Michael Lienau is our guest on Amazing Greats.
He survived a four-day ordeal in the mud and ash of Mount St. Helens in 1980.
So the good segue is this large family. It's kind of a part of your spiritual journey.
When did the documentary actually come out?
Michael Lienau:1995 is when it came out—15 years after the eruption.
Meeting Sherry—and Building a Family of Nine
Ric Hansen:And you'd gotten married before in that period of time to your wife, Sherry, who is not only your wife, but she's also your partner.
And she's the mother of nine.
Well, you're the father of nine.
Tell us how that impacted your life and the faith aspect of that.
Michael Lienau:Right after that experience at Mount St. Helens, I had an opportunity.
I was offered a lot of jobs.
I guess television people like crazy people like me who will go in and film an active volcano or something.
One of those opportunities was Pat Robertson.
He invited me to share my story on The 700 Club, and then he hired me to be his West Coast producer.
I saw it as an opportunity for my faith to grow, and it certainly did.
For the next seven years, I traveled almost nonstop filming stories about faith.
I heard all kinds of stories, and I really, really grew in my relationship with the Lord during that time.
One of those stories was Graham Kerr, the former Galloping Gourmet.
Graham asked me what I was going to do when I was done.
At that time, I was also working for a television show out of Japan, and we were doing biography documentaries on world leaders.
His show, The Galloping Gourmet, was one of the top 10 shows in Japan.
He wanted me to come and work with him, and he was working with a missions group called Youth With A Mission.
So I prayed.
Do I go to New York or Los Angeles, where some friends wanted me to come and work with them in a new studio they were developing there?
Or Tacoma, Washington?
I just sensed the Lord saying to go to Tacoma, Washington.
That was where my destiny was.
Not that film was in Tacoma, but my life was really about the Lord and listening to what He wanted me to do with my life.
I surrendered my life to Him there at Mount St. Helens.
So I ended up moving to Tacoma.
A year or so after moving there, I met my wife.
She was looking for an internship. She had just graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism.
She became the best intern I ever had, and I had to marry her.
We were married in 1987.
We felt like God called us together to do projects together because she loved telling stories of God also.
For the first three years, that's what we did. We traveled and produced films and television shows.
But then we got convicted that God didn't just call us together to do projects, but to have a family.
Our firstborn was born, and he was such a blessing.
Then we wanted to have more kids, and we saw that children were a blessing.
We had our second, Anna, and then we had a third and fourth.
By that time, we were getting older in our lives.
We thought we were praying for a twin when we were having our fourth one, but that didn't happen.
One night my wife was nursing the baby, and she was just bawling in tears.
I said, "What's wrong?"
She said, "There are millions of babies all over the world that are crying with no mama to come and pick them up and feed them."
She said, "We have to adopt one or two."
We had just had our fourth, so we looked into adopting one or two.
Then this opportunity came up—a sibling set of four.
When we started the adoption process, it became five children because the state couldn't tell us about the baby they were still working on the paperwork for.
We said, "Of course. We can't leave a sibling behind."
So it worked out for us to adopt these five beautiful children from foster care in Oregon.
We went from four to nine literally in one day.
That was 23 years ago.
We brought them home on Thanksgiving Day in 2002.
From Four Kids to Nine
Ric Hansen:What's the age range of the nine?
Michael Lienau:They were all between about one and a half by that time to about nine or ten. They were all within that same range.
It was like we had three sets of twins among the five that we'd just adopted.
Our lives were very full with that.
It took a lot of faith for me.
I'm thinking, "Well, we have a minivan that can hold seven. How do we get a van big enough for 11?"
We ended up getting a 15-passenger van.
I felt like a school bus driver.
We continued to include our family in all of our projects and things that we did.
We did a lot of road trips with our family while doing filming—not just volcanoes and earthquakes, but also racial reconciliation.
That's something God really put on my heart very, very young.
I wanted to see racial healing happen in our nation.
I'd seen examples of that, and I just longed to see that happen.
I'd worked on a biography documentary on Alex Haley.
You may remember him. He was the gentleman who wrote the book Roots about his great-great-great-great-grandfather Kunta Kinte, who had come to America in chains when he was only 14 years old.
That really impacted me, just spending time with him.
We got to go not only to his studio in L.A., but to his home in Arkansas, where we learned more about his story.
I'll never forget, he told me it was his dream to someday see healing and reconciliation.
I had no idea what that meant, but I was gripped by that thought of healing and reconciliation.
Then the L.A. riots broke out in the early '90s, and we saw that racial healing was not happening.
There was a lot of trouble in our nation.
But I saw a pathway biblically for that.
When I saw Christian groups doing things—not just prayer, but also making a genuine, heartfelt apology—I saw how much that meant to people.
It could unlock anger, bitterness and hate, and teach people how to forgive and start all over again.
Really, reconciliation isn't the right word.
We can't reconcile back to what never was.
We need to reconcile to what God's original intention was.
It's really getting back to God's original intention for all the different people groups and races and cultures of the world.
That's God's heart.
It really gripped me, and it's something that we've done a lot of in our lives.
From Global Net to LifeNet
Ric Hansen:And this was kind of a new branch.
You had Global Net, and this was LifeNet, right?
This was kind of a spinoff from your production company.
Michael Lienau:Yeah.
Global Net Productions—I started that a long time ago, back when I was about 17 years old.
That's where I'd done all of my documentaries and films on disasters and disaster preparedness.
But when we started doing this reconciliation work, it was more of a Christian ministry.
People wanted to donate to help us with this, so we needed to set up a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
We still have that.
That's lifenetmedia.org, where you can see our documentaries about racial healing.
Ric Hansen:Yeah, and we'll put that in the show notes here too, so people can just click on it and help out and support in any way they choose.
We're talking with cinematographer Michael Lienau, who directed the award-winning documentary The Fire Below Us on the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
From Mount St. Helens to Kilauea
Ric Hansen:You kind of became a student of geologic disasters, if you will.
Then you went to Hawaii and spent some time there filming Kilauea, the active volcanoes there.
Were you just kind of drawn to go see what was going on and add to the story from Mount St. Helens?
Michael Lienau:Back when I was in junior high, I had a geology teacher who would show us films in school of volcanoes erupting.
They were mostly lava and lava flows.
Because I was interested in cinematography, I wanted to someday see a lava flow.
That's so different from Mount St. Helens.
I went to Mount St. Helens thinking I was going to see a lava flow, but there wasn't any.
It was all ash—a totally different kind of volcano.
In 2012, my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and our children sent us to Hawaii.
That's where we had gotten engaged, as a surprise.
It was there that we met David Cunningham, and he had the film institute there.
He invited us to come and work with him on films that he was working on there.
We prayed about it as a family and thought it would be a great opportunity to get our children more involved in some missions work, too.
This was with Youth With A Mission there in Kailua-Kona.
So we moved our whole family there in 2012.
We were only going to be there two years.
But during those two years, so much was happening.
Our children got really involved in school there, so we ended up staying for seven years.
During those seven years, the Kilauea volcano erupted, and it wiped out over 700 homes.
It was quite a big eruption.
We were there covering a lot of that with my camera and ended up doing some films about that volcanic eruption.
Since Mount St. Helens, I'd come out of that wondering:
What happened?
How did it happen?
How did it catch us off guard?
Will it happen again?
People were asking me, "Could this ever happen to Mount Rainier?"
So I did a film called Fire Mountains of the West that explored all of those questions.
While I was doing that film, I met a volcanologist who had changed from volcanology to seismology.
I was really confused by that.
"What do earthquakes have to do with volcanoes?"
I thought they were totally different systems.
But he said Mount St. Helens had caught them off guard, and they had to look into why it was such a big eruption.
They felt like the subduction plate that was fueling these volcanoes was somewhat slippery and wasn't building a lot of friction and building up the magma underneath the ground.
They had to start looking into that.
What they discovered was that in the Pacific Northwest, we have magnitude-nine-plus earthquakes every 150 to 500 years.
That's the average span between these earthquakes.
The last one happened January 26th at 9 p.m. in 1700.
It generated a nine-plus earthquake that shook for four to six minutes and probably killed hundreds or thousands of Native American people along the coastline at that time because of the tsunamis that were generated.
So I did a film called Cascadia: The Hidden Fire that tells that story about the discovery of these mega-earthquakes here in the Pacific Northwest.
It ran on PBS.
Two weeks later, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami happened, killing over 300,000 people.
People were asking the question, "Could this ever happen in America?"
I'd just released this film, so PBS reran it.
It became the highest-rated film in Science Night in PBS history because people were fascinated with this story that had just happened in Indonesia.
Now it could happen here in America someday.
I felt like my experience at Mount St. Helens was my duty to help warn people about volcanic, seismic and geologic hazards.
Again, when we were in Hawaii, we were trying to help people understand the threat of lava flows.
Over 700 homes were lost. In fact, three of those homes were friends of ours who lost their homes there.
I also did a series of films for the Smithsonian Institution called VolFilms, which you can find on YouTube.
They're about volcanic hazards and how you can prepare for volcanic hazards if you live in volcanic areas—which we do right here in the Northwest.
We have volcanoes all over us.
Ric Hansen:Yeah. There's a huge one right over there.
Michael Lienau:Yeah. It's called Mount Rainier.
Faith and Science
Ric Hansen:One more faith question.
You came from a father who was a scientist. You hang out with scientists. You follow volcanoes, which is a science-based entity.
Faith and science sometimes are at loggerheads with one another because supposedly the Earth was created in seven days, and you probably know that that probably didn't happen in seven days.
How do you justify that?
Michael Lienau:I do get asked this question often.
But what I witnessed—I was so close to what was happening there.
To me, I saw a huge catastrophe happen, and it happened so quickly, from March 1980 until May when the big eruption happened.
I saw things happen very rapidly there.
But I can't say that all Earth processes happen that same way because I don't know.
God doesn't give us all the details about how He did this.
He tells us the sequence and how He made them, but we don't know exactly how long it took Him to do it.
He's God. He's eternal.
He can take all the time He wants to create this special place.
I love planet Earth.
Everywhere I travel, I'm fascinated with the differences—the geography and really how people have adapted to the geography of where they live and how it's formed people and formed nations.
It's fascinating to step back from it.
That's what I had to do at Mount St. Helens.
I had to step back from it and think about what had happened to me and all those other people who had either survived there or lost their lives there.
It gave me a unique perspective on all of that.
It's fascinating to think about how God may have created the universe and created this special planet for His special creation, which was us, to enjoy this place.
I certainly enjoy living here in the Northwest.
I've traveled all over the world, but I have to say this is still my favorite place to live, even after living in Hawaii.
I love to go visit Hawaii, but I still love living here in the Northwest.
What's Next?
Ric Hansen:Yeah, me too.
This has been fascinating.
There were some things here that I was going to talk about, but we're running long.
The story is just so amazing, and your life's work is incredible.
I really appreciate your taking the time.
We're going to send people off with a link to go see the documentary.
I think there's a small charge for it or whatever, but we'll give them that opportunity—and to look at your website and to look at the LifeNet website as well.
Is there any specific way that we can support you other than donations, which are probably always accepted at LifeNet?
Anything else—prayer or anything you're working on that we can pray for?
Michael Lienau:Yeah, I covet your prayers always.
We're still working hard on the assignments that we sense the Lord is giving us.
We're working on updating some of our racial reconciliation projects.
So pray for that strategy and for funding to help us really get that story out.
I think there's a lot of confusion about racism and racial issues.
Really, there's only one answer: Jesus.
And the Word of God and how we should live and get along.
I would love to see more of that message get out.
Even within the church, I think there's some confusion with that too.
Then, with the other work that we do, when we were raising our family, we were interested in what that generation of children was watching and consuming.
At that time, a lot of supernatural content was coming out, and still today it seems to be the thing that really attracts kids, especially in their formative years when they're trying to form their worldview—like for me when I was young.
We sensed that we should do a TV series on the supernatural.
We want to really help people understand what that is and look into areas like the paranormal—Bigfoot and UFOs—and what are those things?
What are the things that we don't see, or maybe sometimes we do see?
What is that?
We're working on a supernatural series called Even the Darkness.
That's another project we're working on.
We have a website for that too, and we'd love for people to see the trailer and support us in that way too.
Ric Hansen:What's the website address for that?
Michael Lienau:eventhedarkness.com
Michael's Life Verse
Ric Hansen:Do you have a favorite Scripture verse—a life verse—that you retreat to from time to time?
Michael Lienau:Yeah, I have lots of them because the Lord has been so good to me in so many ways.
Psalm 104, verse 32, shows how personal God can be.
"He looks at the earth and it trembles; He touches mountains and they smoke."
You can't be any more clear about that being a volcano.
I think that David, if he wrote that Psalm, witnessed a volcano erupting and saw God's finger on that.
I feel like that's what I witnessed too.
He's a very personal God.
He's right there with us no matter what we're going through.
He loves to communicate with us.
He loves it when we just stop and listen.
When we listen, He wants to tell us things.
He wants to tell us how much He loves us and how much He cares for us and how He'll see us through whatever we're going through.
Whether it be a volcanic eruption and we're confused and in the dark about it and we're scared and thinking we're going to die—God is right there waiting to just carry us under the shadow of His wings.
Psalm 91 is another one that I look at often whenever I doubt things or get scared.
There's just so many good verses.
Final Thoughts
Ric Hansen:Well, Michael Lienau, so great to meet you.
So great to have this time to talk and share your story.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
Michael Lienau:Thank you, Ric. I appreciate the opportunity.
God bless you and all that you're doing too.
Ric Hansen:Oh man.
What an amazing career and a life story.
Wow.
Award-winning cinematographer, director of the internationally renowned documentary on the Mount St. Helens eruption, a Jesus follower for sure, and a father of nine.
Michael Lienau on Amazing Greats.
For more amazing stories like this, hit subscribe and follow us.
Thanks for sharing Amazing Greats and for the likes and reviews.
God bless.
Comments