In the 1960s, archaeologists digging at Masada, Herod’s fortress by the Dead Sea, found ancient date seeds buried under rubble. Radiocarbon dating put them at about 2,000 years old. The Judean date palm, praised in ancient times for its flavor and medicine, had long since disappeared. For over 40 years the seeds sat in storage. Then in 2005, Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute in Israel took on a challenge people thought was botanically impossible: getting one to grow. In March 2005, one of them germinated, becoming the oldest seed ever successfully sprouted. They named it Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible. It now grows in the Arava Institute’s research park at Kibbutz Ketura. What looked dead for twenty centuries still had life in it. Never write off what God has planted.
Martin Rinckart was a pastor and musician in the German city of Eilenburg during the Thirty Years’ War, which ran from 1618 to 1648. War, famine, and plague filled the town with refugees. As one of the last ministers left alive in the city, Rinckart stretched his own resources to care for people, and at the height of the plague he was conducting nearly fifty funerals a day. Out of that season came the hymn we still sing every Thanksgiving: “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices.” In its 1663 printing it was titled “A little table prayer,” which suggests it was meant to be sung as grace before a meal. Picture that. A worn-out preacher, scraps on the table, funerals all day, and he sits down and sings about countless gifts of love. Gratitude doesn’t wait for good times. It’s how faith talks in hard ones.
In May 2018, a 22-year-old undocumented migrant from Mali was walking down a Paris street when he saw a crowd staring up at a four-year-old boy dangling from a fourth-floor balcony. Mamoudou Gassama had every reason to keep his head down and avoid attention. Instead he ran across the road and pulled himself up the outside of the building, balcony to balcony, and lifted the crying child to safety. He later said, “I just climbed up and thank God, God helped me. The more I climbed the more I had the courage to climb up higher.” President Macron gave him a medal for courage and said he would be made a French citizen. Courage grows as you take the next step.
David Livingstone spent his childhood working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill. He trained to be a medical missionary to China, but the Opium War shut that door. Then he heard Robert Moffat describe “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before,” and he went to Africa. Things were hard. His only convert in those early years went back to his old ways. Livingstone was not an easy man, and he fought with many fellow workers. Still, he kept pressing into the interior to open what he called God’s Highway. Years later, worn out and lost in swamps, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. He ended his race the way he ran it.
John Wesley was an ordained minister who had even sailed to America as a missionary. Yet he struggled. He wrote that he was fighting continually but not conquering, falling and rising and falling again. On May 24, 1738, he went very unwillingly to a small meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. Someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans. About a quarter before nine, as the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, Wesley said, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” He wrote that he trusted Christ alone for salvation and received assurance that his sins were taken away. He went on to preach some 40,000 sermons. Religion became a relationship.
