The Vault Inside the Mountain

On the Norwegian island of Svalbard, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, a concrete portal juts from a frozen mountainside. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault looks like a tomb — a sealed chamber buried deep in permafrost, silent, cold, and still.

But step inside, and you find something astonishing. On metal shelves in foil-lined boxes, more than a million seed samples from nearly every nation on earth wait in the dark. Wheat from Syria. Rice from the Philippines. Corn varieties that haven't been planted in generations. Each seed holds the blueprint for life — roots, stems, leaves, fruit — locked inside a husk no bigger than a fingernail.

The vault was built for catastrophe. When civil war destroyed Syria's seed bank in Aleppo, researchers made the first-ever withdrawal from Svalbard and replanted those seeds in Lebanon and Morocco. What war had buried, the vault gave back alive.

On that first Easter morning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary walked toward what they believed was nothing more than a sealed tomb. They carried burial spices and shattered hopes. But the earth shook. The stone was rolled away. An angel sat where death should have been and spoke the words that changed everything: "He is not here. He has risen."

What looked like a tomb turned out to be the most life-giving place on earth. And from that empty chamber, the promise of new life spread — and is still spreading — to every nation under heaven.