by Anna Haiar

Don’t Give Up – All Hope is Not Lost!

“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”
Habakkuk 3:17–18, English Standard Version

Every year, a Master Gardener – who also happens to be a student’s grandmother – graciously teaches our elementary students about plant life and growing things from seed. Our kids come home with a seedling, barely alive, and hand it off to me to take over caring for and feeding this tiny plant. Despite my success in a greenhouse, houseplants are very different and much more temperamental. More often than not, the seedling dies because I forgot to water it. The plant in this photo just barely escaped the same fate as the other seedlings.

The leaves on this spider plant had gone from tired to brittle, then dropped. For weeks the pot looked like a stick in dirt. I kept meaning to throw it out and stop pretending. Instead I poured a little water in whenever I passed by. Then one morning, there was a small green push at the soil line. A small sign that something had been happening where I could not see it.

Habakkuk knew that kind of empty pot. The verse we read is a verse for the season when every visible marker of blessing is gone. Habakkuk does not deny the barrenness. He names it, line by line: no buds, no grapes, no olives, no grain, no flock. Then he chooses joy anyway, not because the circumstances improved, but because God had not changed.

We are quick to treat a quiet season as a dead one. We assume that if we cannot see growth, nothing is happening. But roots do their work in the dark and in places we cannot see. Faithfulness often looks like watering when there is no evidence it will matter. A little water, a little trust, a little praise when the fig tree still has not budded is the kind of obedience that God asks of us during dry season. The God who works underground is the same God who will, in His time, push growth through the soil and light the pathway of our life.

Copyright Family of Christ Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado.