In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

by Mark Batterson

In 1963 Israeli archaeologists excavated Herod the Great’s fortress at Masada. As they carefully removed layers of history, they found the usual suspects—human remains and ancient artifacts. But the most curious find may have been a clay jar with seeds preserved inside it. Researchers at the University of Zurich, using radiocarbon dating, placed them between 155 BC and AD 64, so approximately two thousand years old. They also discovered that the seeds belonged to an extinct variety of the Judean date palm. Those seeds were stored at Bar-Ilan University in Israel for forty years. Then in 2005 three seeds were planted at Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arabah desert. Eight weeks later one of the seeds sprouted. It’s the oldest-known seed to be successfully germinated, so they named it the Methuselah tree, after the oldest man in the Bible. By 2008 that one seed had grown into a five-foot palm tree with a dozen leaves. And by 2015 it was a fully grown, pollen-producing palm tree.1 In the field of botany, there are two categories of seeds—orthodox and unorthodox. What sets an orthodox seed apart is its ability to survive. Unorthodox seeds can’t survive below ten degrees Celsius, but orthodox seeds can survive droughts, glaciers, and centuries, even twenty centuries, like Methuselah. God-ordained dreams are orthodox seeds. They have the ability to survive any and every circumstance, and they stand the test of time. Even when you die, your dreams do not. Long after you are gone, your dre...