The Orchard Near the Dead Sea

In 2001, permaculture designer Geoff Lawton stood on a barren, salt-crusted plot in the Jordan Valley, just miles from the Dead Sea. The soil was so degraded that nothing grew. Temperatures regularly exceeded 120 degrees. Locals said the land was finished.

Lawton's team began with the smallest intervention — shallow ditches called swales to catch whatever rain fell. They directed every precious trickle into the parched earth rather than letting it run off. They mulched. They planted. And they waited.

Within four months, the first green shoots appeared. Within two years, fig trees fruited in soil that had been dead. Nitrogen-fixing plants healed the salt-poisoned ground. By the time cameras returned to document the project, a lush food forest stood where only cracked earth had been — pomegranates, citrus, and dates all thriving below sea level in one of the harshest environments on earth.

Ezekiel saw something remarkably similar in his vision. Water trickled from God's temple — barely ankle-deep at first — then deepened into a river no one could cross. Where that river flowed, everything lived. Even the Dead Sea turned fresh. Trees lined the banks with fruit that never failed and leaves that brought healing.

The prophet's message endures: what flows from the presence of the Almighty does not stay small. It deepens, widens, and transforms everything it touches — even the places we have written off as beyond hope.