The Man Who Stopped the Desert

In the early 1980s, a devastating drought turned Burkina Faso's Sahel region into a wasteland. Villages emptied. Crops failed. The earth cracked like old leather under a relentless sun. Most people fled, but a farmer named Yacouba Sawadogo stayed behind and did something his neighbors thought was madness — he began planting trees in the dead ground.

Sawadogo revived an ancient technique called zaï, digging small pits in the hardpan soil and filling them with compost and seeds. Termites came first, boring tunnels that let rainwater seep deeper. Then grasses returned. Then shrubs. Then trees. Over three decades, Sawadogo transformed more than seventy acres of barren wasteland into thriving forest. Birds returned. Animals returned. People returned. A place everyone had written off as permanently dead was teeming with life.

Isaiah saw something similar with the eyes of faith. He looked at the parched wilderness of exile and despair and proclaimed that the desert would rejoice and blossom like the crocus. Waters would break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand would become a pool.

God specializes in exactly this kind of restoration — taking what is cracked, barren, and abandoned and coaxing life from it again. The ransomed of the Lord will return to Zion with singing, Isaiah promises. Everlasting joy will crown their heads. What looks permanently dead to us is simply waiting for the hand of the Almighty.