The Farmer Who Planted Trees He Would Never See

In 1930, a seventy-year-old Kansas farmer named Elzéard Bouffier — no, that's fiction. But Richard St. Barbe Baker was very real. At age twenty-six, this British forester arrived in Kenya and saw land stripped bare by decades of colonial farming. The soil was dying. Locals told him nothing would grow there again.

Baker didn't listen to the evidence. He recruited twelve thousand Kikuyu men and women, handed them seedlings, and asked them to plant. They called themselves the Men of the Trees. Over the next sixty years, Baker traveled to every continent, inspiring the planting of over twenty-six billion trees — most of which he would never see reach maturity. He planted in the Sahara. He planted in eroded hillsides across India. He planted in places where every reasonable assessment said the land was beyond saving.

When reporters asked why he kept going, Baker said simply, "I believe in the power of what a seed can become."

That is the faith of Abraham. Romans 4:18 tells us that "against all hope, Abraham in hope believed." The evidence said Sarah's womb was dead. The calendar said the promise had expired. Every reasonable voice said, "Give it up." But Abraham looked at the barren ground of his circumstances and saw what God had promised — a forest of descendants as numerous as the stars. And Scripture tells us it was credited to him as righteousness.