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.
In Norway sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe place to store backup copies of the world’s crop seeds. A research center called ICARDA kept a seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, with about 150,000 cereal, food, and feed samples from more than 100 countries. From 2008 to 2014, they deposited duplicate copies in the vault. Then civil war forced them out of Aleppo. In September 2015, for the first time ever, seeds were withdrawn from the vault: 38,073 samples in 128 boxes, shipped to Lebanon and Morocco. They were sown that November. By 2016 they had harvested fresh seed, and in 2017 more than 20,000 samples went right back into the vault. Somebody saved seed in good times so there’d be bread in hard times. That’s what faithful sowing looks like. You plant for a harvest you may need later, and the harvest gives you seed to plant again.
On March 11, 2005, Kevin Berthia went to the Golden Gate Bridge. Overwhelmed by depression and medical bills for his premature daughter, he climbed over the rail. California Highway Patrol Officer Kevin Briggs walked up and started talking. Berthia later said it was the compassion in Briggs’ voice that let him lower his guard. They talked for 92 minutes about everything he was facing. Briggs helped him see that his daughter, whose first birthday was the next month, needed him. Berthia climbed back over. Years later the two met again, and Berthia said the friendship works because Briggs never judged him. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer is a patient ear and a voice full of compassion.
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.
On Española Island in the Galapagos, the giant tortoise population had dropped to just 15 animals. A breeding program begun in the 1960s brought together two other males and 12 females with a tortoise named Diego, who had spent decades at a zoo. The program worked so well that Española now has a stable population of around 2,300 tortoises. Diego alone fathered at least 800 offspring. On June 15, 2020, when he was over 100 years old, Diego and 14 other tortoises were carried back to Española and released into the wild. One faithful old tortoise helped bring a whole species back from the edge. Faithfulness over a long life can bless generations.
