The Tree That Thrives on Nothing

High in California's White Mountains, at nearly 10,000 feet, the bristlecone pines cling to slopes of bare dolomite rock. The soil is almost powder. Rainfall barely reaches ten inches a year. Winds rake the ridgeline so fiercely that the trees grow twisted and stripped, their wood polished smooth on the windward side. Most of the trunk appears dead — just pale, exposed grain spiraling skyward.

And yet these are the oldest living organisms on Earth. A bristlecone named Methuselah has stood for over 4,800 years. It was already ancient when Moses climbed Sinai.

Here is what baffles botanists: bristlecone pines in richer, sheltered soil die younger. It is the trees rooted in the harshest ground — the ones with almost nothing — that endure for millennia. The scarcity slows their growth to a crawl, producing wood so dense that rot, insects, and disease cannot penetrate it. What looks like deprivation is actually the source of their remarkable strength.

Habakkuk understood this. When the fig tree fails, when the vines are bare, when the fields and flocks yield nothing — that is precisely where faith grows its deepest grain. "Yet I will rejoice in the Lord," the prophet declares, not because circumstances have improved, but because the Sovereign Lord Himself has become his strength. And God makes his feet sure, like a deer on the heights — steady, even on the barren ridgeline where nothing else can stand.