Habakkuk’s Hope
“Look…and watch – be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your day that you would not believe even if I told you” - Habakkuk 1:5
I could hear the sirens in the background as my sister began to text me pictures of bright oranges flames surrounding the porch and leaping out the second story windows. The family homestead was burning. My older brother had gone in to get my 90-year-old grandpa, but unfortunately, they didn’t make it out.
It was December 19, 2020, almost Christmas – the season of hope – and instead of celebrating I would be heading back home to bury my older brother and grandpa, to comfort my grieving parents and help them start over again in their 60s. This wasn’t the first time I had gotten a call like this. Two years ago, my older brother who died in the fire, had called me to tell me that our youngest brother had committed suicide. We still to this day don’t know what happened there and the grief haunts our family.
How much tragedy can one family take? My parents have buried, not one, but TWO sons – their oldest and their youngest. The sheer heaviness of it all was just so much – still so much.
2020 was like that - just one tragedy after another. The challenges just kept coming for us all.
So, what are we supposed to do in the midst of the hurt and heartache? Overwhelming obstacles and unexpected challenges? When everything else in this world fails– houses burn, people die, friends betray, and jobs are lost? When all our hopes and dreams that we worked so hard for – just disappear in a matter of hours?
Those are the moments that define our faith.
Standing in the soot, ash covering my boots, I put my arms around my grieving mother and I questioned: God HOW MUCH MORE? Where ARE you in this? Don’t you see our grief? our pain? our suffering? And he whispered the words from Habakkuk to my heart: “Look…and watch – be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your day that you would not believe even if I told you” (Hab.1:5). You see, my heart was so full of grief that I was losing the forest for the trees. I couldn’t, and even now I struggle, to see how God is going to make beauty for ashes (Is. 61:3). God’s Word tells us “there may be pain in the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5), and so many of us are in a dark, dark night.
But God’s Word promises us that He is unfailing (Ro. 8:39), that He is constant (Is. 40:8, 28), that He will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5) – and in times of grief and tragedy, when we just don’t know what God is doing, we have to trust that HE DOES. He sees the grand plan, and so like Habakkuk, I chose to “stand at my watch, and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say” (Hab. 2:1). Won’t you join me, waiting to be utterly amazed?
